Flight of Landale
by The Exile
Summary: The Great Light is invading. With Rune's help, Wren and Demi build and fly a spaceship beyond the Algol solar system to find allies. They team up with Yuri's fleet to fight the malign entity that corrupted the Earth civilisation. The finale of the 'Stereopathique' and 'Disappear' story arc, also references 'Silent Zone'. Written for SciFi Big Bang 2014. Post-PSIV AU with spoilers.
1. Chapter 1

Light flared out across the chamber, a blinding coruscation of silvery blue that swirled into vortices of wild energy or formed ghostly shapes with jagged claws and bestial fangs. The deafening sound of crashing thunder and the angry crackling of lightning reverberated madly around the room. Flashes of rose pink and lime green shimmered in fiery lines across the veins of crystal that formed the walls of the chamber, as they did the entire tower, giving the appearance that they were grown rather than built. Where the light escaped into the clear night sky of a planet unpolluted by human habitation, it refracted against the crystal dust blown by the chill wind to form an aurora. The night was silent apart from the omnipresent background hum, the song of the wind, the crystals resonating with each other and something else unseen that had been there since the dawn of time. Its one sentient humanoid observer could not appreciate it fully, as he was busy trying to hold off the furious attacks of a being of pure energy and information whose physical body had been constructed specifically so that its defences were strong against his usual methods of attack.

Rune sprang out of the way of the Legeon and Hewn spells. Well aware that he could not avoid being hit entirely, and that the specific forces he could defend himself against did not cover this focussed barrage of pure light, he was grateful for his innate magic defences that dampened the blow somewhat, as well as his quick, if not intensive, command of healing magic. All of this took less than a second. He was already focussing his mind and gathering his own pool of psychic energy, far beyond the limits of even those of another Esper, a magically gifted race, in preparation for a counter-attack of equal force. Not only did Rune Walsh have more battle experience than most Esper wizards his age, having seen real combat behind enemy lines rather than training or guard duties, there had been a time when he could draw upon the memories of another, a revered, almost legendary ancestor whose role he had been chosen to fill. Five years ago, the process had malfunctioned, but he still remembered a lot of the wisdom imparted exclusively to him, and had since spent most of his waking hours training to be a worthy successor to, if no longer the living embodiment of, the great wizard Lutz.

Not that Lutz's memories could have helped him much here. The millennia-old Guardian of Algol would never have encountered such an enemy, and would not have left advice on how to fight such, any more than most armies taught you how to take down their own leaders.

"Nawat!" he yelled, reaching his arm to point his outstretched palm at the part of the twenty foot tall, vaguely human torso shaped pillar of light surrounded by a thick skeletal armoured carapace that looked most like the head. The cobalt-blue orbs that swarmed around it looked vaguely like eyes and there was one that tended to hover in the centre, so Rune preferred to aim for it. It probably didn't matter which part of the construct he hit; its only purpose was to allow its inhabitant to interact with the physical world at all. He doubted that an entity as old as the solar system that probably had a say in its creation, even one that was notorious for having no imagination and constantly complaining about how it was only ever assigned to guard duty, would be stupid enough to build weak points into its entirely optional physical shell.

As he spoke the ancient word of power, a ray of solid blue light shot from his palm. The air inside the column instantly supercooled, forming giant shards of ice that flew towards the now freezing vacuum around Sa-Lews' head with all the speed that Rune's prodigious mental energy could fling that much mass. While the ice shattered on impact, Rune saw with some satisfaction that the bone armour chipped and cracked, the light inside fluctuating like a flickering candle flame about to be put out by a sudden draught. It took a lot of structural damage before he could even tell that he had injured Sa-lews. He threw up his mental shield against the attack he knew would inevitably follow. After so long with Sa-Lews as a sparring partner, Rune was beginning to predict the Rykrosian guardian's attack patterns. Not that it really helped him. His true enemy wouldn't be the same as Sa-Lews, they would be ten times as powerful, intelligent enough that they had already managed to insidiously corrupt the entire planet on one occasion, and would really be trying to kill him. Not that Sa-Lews hadn't tried to kill him once before, but he had been in a team of four back then, so the fight had only been long, painful and terrifyingly close, rather than a guaranteed loss if he didn't retreat.

"Enough!" Sa-Lews exclaimed. The note of impatience in his tone of voice, crackling slightly as it boomed around the chamber with no particular point of origin, betrayed Rune's suspicions. He was still taking too long and not doing enough damage. He was a lot closer than he had been when he first fought Sa-Lews, especially as he was now alone and Sa-Lews was no longer restraining their power, but Rune would never be able to survive a battle against the Great Light.

"The trouble is, most of the techniques you've been trained in, were designed to battle the Profound Darkness," Sa-Lews told him for what must have been the fifth time, "If we could only teach you some of the techniques used by the Profound Darkness. We have some of them in our memory banks. Not as many as we do light-based techniques, but..."

"It would take me a long time to learn an entirely new set of spells," replied Rune as he finished tending to his wounds with healing magic. Rune had never been very good at healing magic but fortunately, Lutz was a lot better, and had managed to pass down some of his training before the two of them were forced to separate again, "You said yourself that we don't have much time left."

"It's Le Roof who keeps lecturing us all about the oncoming inevitable battle," said Sa-Lews, "He knows what's going to happen. I just train warriors and guard relics. He also told me to pass on the news that he's found some more of the people he's been looking for. People who are latently gifted in dark magic, or who are even actively practising the arts, and who aren't complete psychopaths."

As Le Roof had explained to Rune several times in order to reassure him, dark magic and its use did not inherently corrupt a person, drive them insane or tempt them into evil, any more than learning to use Foi turned you into a pyromaniac. It tended to use more brutal and instinctively fearsome aspects of the world and less savoury human emotions, but there was nothing pleasant about the extremes of fire, wind or water when you were a small, fragile entity with a brief lifespan, especially when you routinely used the concentrated essence of that aspect of the world to cause large amounts of death. If Hahn could learn Savol and be perfectly fine, Le Roof told him in a rare demonstration of humour in a supragodlike ethereal intelligence, there was nothing wrong with someone randomly picking up Deathspell or Corrosion. During the accidental release of the Profound Darkness, there had been a definite statistical correspondence between people learning Dark techniques and being corrupted by the malicious entity. However, this was more to do with the much closer presence of the Profound Darkness, her habit of getting everything done by possessing and brainwashing people, and the lack of anyone else to teach Dark techniques that led so many mages to listen to her dark whisperings. Now that the Profound Darkness was banished once again, the only things that really made Dark techniques any more sinister were the pressure of prejudiced societal expectations and the endless problem with the uprising of neo-Zioist cults in Kadary. Elite Hunters such as Chaz were doing their best to deal with the latter.

"I still don't think it's actually going to work," said Rune, leaning on a wall as he suddenly realised how exhausted his magical reserves already were. The orbs surrounding Sa-Lews fluttered in a wave that passed through the entire swarm; it was hard to make out emotions on a Rykrosian, but Rune could have sworn that Sa-Lews looked taken aback at the idea of someone trying to argue with Le Roof. Of course, he thought with a smile, only Chaz ever argues with Le Roof. He suddenly realised how much wisdom there had been in the young man's rebellion against his destiny, a sentiment that the rest of the party had seen only as teenage mood swings. Now exactly the thing that Chaz had warned him about was happening to the solar system.

"What I mean is, I don't think just turning the powers of the darkness against the light will work, any more than using the light against the darkness really solved the problem," said Rune, "Sure, it allowed us to survive the battle, even win an important victory, but it didn't really help Algol in the long run. It probably even caused a lot of the problems we're having here."

"Okay then, Lutz, what do you suggest?" the enunciation of the title sounded sarcastic, another emotion that sounded odd coming from a Rykrosian.

"I'm not sure. I just don't think that it's a good idea for different parts of Algol to be in conflict with each other when it's Algol that is under attack," said Rune, "The enemy isn't really the Light, or the Darkness, it's this virus, these events in history and these intruders that are always coming into Algol. My sister... Doran said so. Before she... anyway, Le Roof said himself that he didn't really know that it would solve the problem if we fought the Great Light. What if we just tip the balance in favour of the Profound Darkness and get attacked by her again?"

"The battle's going to happen whether you like it or not. You're going to have to fight the Great Light, or entire planets, millions of people, could die."

"I know, and I know we have to do this in the short term. I just wish there was a weapon we could use in the long term. Something that can fix the whole of Algol."

"It sounds just the sort of thing your sister would come out with. I think that might even be what she was looking for up here in the first place."

"Did Doran ever find anything like that?" Rune said, choosing his words carefully. No matter what she believed, and had apparently managed to convince a Rykrosian of, Doran was not his sister, she was Lutz's sister. Rune hated people mistaking him for Lutz. It was almost as annoying as Rune mistaking himself for Lutz.

"Not in weaponised form, no."

"I'm glad. I wouldn't trust her with a weapon," he said, shuddering as he thought back to the time when Doran had used a corrupted Re-Faze to launch an enormously powerful Megid technique straight at Motavia, wiping out Monsen and half of Aiedo, in an overenthusiastic attempt to stop an invader from outside the solar system from brainwashing and corrupting most of the planet.

"She meant well, though," he said, mostly to himself, "She was trying to protect Algol, in her own way. She was just bat-shit crazy."

"And Re-Faze was encouraging her," added Sa-Lews, "He should know better than to get himself corrupted."

"You don't say that about Le Roof," noted Rune. Sa-Lews did not respond. As well as occasionally displaying human emotions, he was learning that Rykrosians also had a strict unwritten hierarchy, formed cliques and had such things as personal favourites and rivals. No other Rykrosians apart from the Profound Darkness and the Great Light had ever attacked each other before, though. It was the worst crime imaginable for them. The energy released by attacks powerful enough to damage the true form of a Rykrosian could accidentally annihilate a galaxy. Petty arguments, however, were expected to last for millennia.

"Speaking of Le Roof, he has summoned you. He has important information for you."

Rune sighed, stood up and walked out of the door. He hoped that the urgent summons meant that practice was over for today.


	2. Chapter 2

Predicting a cold wind full of crystalline dust particles that could bite into unprotected flesh, Rune wrapped his white traveller's cloak tightly around his tall, slim frame as he incanted a minor shielding spell that would protect him from the worst of the elements. Not exactly powerfully built, Rune was more toned than average for the naturally slender Esper race due to his long, battle-filled journey across Algol. His ceremonial robes were kept a spotless white, apparently to symbolise purity of body and spirit, but his actual work clothes picked up all sorts of stains, despite his constant attempts to magically clean them off. From what he had experienced of Lutz's personality, he doubted the ancient wizard was the embodiment of serene majesty everyone claimed him to be, despite being even more full of himself than the modern Esper. If anyone had ever matched legend's image of Lutz, it was this planet itself, a silent, ponderous wanderer across galaxies, buzzing with power that saturated the very air.

As he stepped out of the Strength Tower's arched front gates, the lowest buckle of his cloak came undone again and the began to flap away from his leaf-green tunic. He sighed and trudged onwards, watching the imprints that his boots made in the dust until they were blown away again, until the jagged gold-tinged spire of the Silence Temple loomed into view. There were no paths between the three Towers and the Temple, the only landmarks on Rykros that Rune knew of, not that he had any way of actually exploring the rest of the planet, but he had the route memorised. At least there were no longer any servants of the Profound Darkness to attack him on his way there and back.

Despite not being obviously mechanical, only unusually smooth and well crafted compared to the organic appearance of the rest of the Temple and Towers, the door slid open to admit him as he stepped up to it, then shut behind him and locked in a way that Rune knew from experience to be completely unbreachable by any but expected guests. With Le Roof's ability to predict most people's actions even before those performing them even thought about doing them, as well as the planet itself being invisible to the naked eye or any known scanning technology, there were few unexpected guests to the Silence Temple.

As he entered the Temple, Rune was struck once more by the intense feeling that there were unseen processes that happened here, processes that had been running silently without fail for thousands of years, all congregating in the central chamber. Ringed by a single corridor that connected four smaller chambers at each face of the temple building, none of them enclosed by doors, the central chamber featured an intricate pattern of triangular mosaic tiles in a much darker crystal that Rune hadn't encountered anywhere else on the planet. The pattern appeared abstract but Rune guessed it was a map or diagram, symbolic of some force of nature, maybe the shape of a spell in progress or a celestial phenomenon of some kind that Rykros had observed on its travels. Its very central diamond-shaped mosaic glowed, healed him of the strain of his trek across the wastes as a gesture of courtesy, then plunged him into the darkness that heralded a conversation with Le Roof.

A sensation of peace washed over Rune as he saw the first whorl of light that would spread across the entire floor and make up Le Roof's spiral galaxy shaped form. Rune always wondered if it was the actual shape of the galaxy that the Algol solar system was situated in.

"What did you wish to see me for?" asked Rune, lowering himself to one knee as a sign of respect. As far as he knew, Le Roof did not feel the need to be addressed by a title.

"The event that threatens Algol is now closer," the soft-spoken reply was projected directly into his mind, "Its nature has become clearer to me. The forces of Earth are gathering for an attack, very close by, and I am sure I can feel the Great Light's presence somewhere too close for comfort, but there is something else. It is drawing the events closer, too fast for me to predict."

"Are you saying we need to worry about yet another enemy?"

"No, not necessarily an enemy. In fact, I think our allies are about to do something unexpected. And there's a third party, not anyone we know to be an enemy or an ally."

"Can't you monitor what our allies are doing? I thought you were scouting among them..."

"Yes, that is going according to plan, and I do not fully understand why I am having so much difficulty following them. Understanding what is happening to Algol is more difficult for me anyway, now that the cycle of destiny is broken, but the sheer confusion I am experiencing suggests that our allies are about to do something entirely unexpected, beyond my ability to imagine alternative scenarios, or... that they are planning to leave the Algol solar system!"

"Who would be that crazy? Algol doesn't have that kind of technology any more!" said Rune, "Even if they did, it would be suicide, for all we know, Algol is completely surrounded by the Earth fleet. They're not defecting over to the enemy, are they? The Earth messenger seemed very persuasive..."

"I don't believe the enemy will try the brainwashing tactic again, after what happened last time," remarked Le Roof, "In any case, Rykros passes straight through Earth territory. That's how I became corrupted in the first place. I would be able to predict such a journey."

"So, another route that Rykros doesn't take? Maybe one that Earth doesn't know about?"

"It should be impossible. Such a route would be blocked by Algol's own protective shield. Remember, the Great Light is being kept out as thoroughly as the Profound Darkness is being kept in. Yes, I realise that it must look like the shields aren't holding," said Le Roof, once again predicting Rune's immediate reaction, "But the damage done to Algol so far is nothing compared to the catastrophe that would happen if the shields actually started failing."

"We already know that at least one ship can currently get in, though," said Rune. Historically, there had been even larger space migrations, an entire flight of generation ships that left behind the doomed planet Palma even as the brief halo of its explosion spread across the cold darkness of space. However, the evacuation was ill-timed, many of the ark-ships never even made it clear of the explosion in time, several of them crash-landed on Palma or Dezolis, and of the few ships that actually left the solar system, there was no information on Rykros' data-banks and a lot of evidence that the information was very deliberately targeted for viral infection. Le Roof did not believe the outlook for the survivors to be particularly good, although Rune found that he could not help but have faith in the species that had bred Alis Landale, "That means one can get out, if it's small enough and sneaky enough. I can see why someone might want to take the initiative and see what's beyond Algol, why so much of it wants to destroy us."

"Such an action would not be wise," said Le Roof, "Not all of the damage done to Rykros' data banks has been entirely repaired. I cannot be sure that information on the region of space immediately surrounding Algol has not been altered, misleading information added or vital warnings removed. Because I already know that something Rykros encounters on its orbital path is responsible for the planet's corruption, facts relating to these areas of space are the ones I trust the least, and these areas of space are the ones I suspect the most of being capable of corrupting something vital to Algol's survival again."

"So, you're just not going to allow people to leave the solar system? We're supposed to stay here under siege, with the walls falling apart around us? They're not going to obey you, Le Roof. They'll start thinking of you as just as bad as an enemy that keeps trying to force people to leave," said Rune, "There are lots of people like Chaz in Algol, and not all of them are going to sympathise with us to start off with."

"If there are indeed gaps in the shields, I doubt I could actually stop people leaving," admitted Le Roof, "I only wish to contact the people involved in such a venture, so I can assess their suitability, train them to resist corruption and teach them as much as I already know about the Universe outside Algol."

"It's probably the androids," surmised Rune, "Wren and Demi are the only people I know who could pull something like that off. I'll go and have a talk with them. They'd probably agree, if you're really going to give them vital information. I've been wondering what Wren's doing at a time like this, anyway."

Of all the people who Rune would want fighting beside him in a battle against the forces that threatened Algol, Wren would be his first choice. Not only was he a seven foot tall, heavily armed and armoured combat android, he also monitored the control satellite Zelan, responsible for linking together all the planetary maintenance systems on the planets of Algol, detecting and efficiently countering security threats. Wren had experience of fighting the Profound Darkness, knew how to handle threats that could corrupt machinery, human minds and the very fate of a planet with equal ease, was up to date with the current threat and, having been active for 999 years, was somewhat aware of its historical context. Although not a combat model, the operations control android Demi was younger (only 300 years old), in better repair, was equipped to repair other androids and provide medical attention to humans, and most importantly, knew how to deal with a corrupted Wren android.

Yes, he needed to visit Wren and Demi. Chaz and Rika, too, if they weren't too busy with their own life these days.

Besides, Rune still couldn't actually get off the planet without Wren's help. While he was strengthening his powers to the extent that, with a great deal of difficulty, he could just about manage to reach a location on another planet of the solar system with magic if there was a specially prepared teleport circle at both ends of the jump, such a thing did not exist on the Zelan space station and he still hadn't tested whether technique worked on artificial satellites at all. Telepathic communication with an android was also impossible but, fortunately for Rune, Demi had thought of this, and had provided all three of them with electronic communicators whose signal strength was great enough to work off-planet. Rune had left his communicator in the Strength Tower, along with all his other worldly belongings. The training was so intense lately that the small side-chamber he used to recover between sessions had become his temporary new home.

These thoughts did not improve his mood when he heard a loud explosion and saw a conflagration of white flame large enough to reach the corona of stardust in the sky when he ran outside.

Far too attuned to Sa-Lews for his own good these days, Rune knew what had happened before even Le Roof could announce it.

Sa-Lews had just been possessed by the Great Light.


	3. Chapter 3

"Are you sure that's the right part?" Nisa yelled across the room from the door she was guarding, the only entrance into the storage room, to her colleague who was balanced precariously on top of a pile of large metal crates to reach up to a half-collapsed row of heavy duty shelves. The shelves had been ripped free of the far wall in some incident with a malfunctioning Browren-class military android that now lay crushed under the pile of crates. Judging by the layers of rust that congealed inside the exposed wiring under its chest, this had happened centuries ago. The device they were trying to pull free of the wreckage looked like it had survived in better condition. At least, Nisa hoped so. She wasn't even sure what the device was supposed to look like, never mind how to tell the difference between a faulty or working one, or, for that matter, how it worked or what it did at all. She was just following orders given to her by her most recent employers, the androids Wren and Demi.

"It appears to match the picture on the instructions we were given," replied the android who held the crate. While the android, despite his slight frame and rather unassuming appearance, could easily have lifted the device on his own, something that the two Palmans who stood guard probably couldn't do, his short stature meant that it took him a while to safely lift the device from the shelf. He probably would have survived the fall without anything more than superficial damage, unless the device landed on his head, but there was no way of knowing how much damage it would do to the device. The object in question was shaped like a conical funnel, made of a well polished sheet metal, large enough that they could only just fit it into the boot of their Landrover and had a large mass of different coloured tubes splaying out from the wider end, with something that looked like an engine vent at the other end. It was covered in display panels and lights. If it was actually the right part, they had been told it was something to with improving the engine of a starship so it had enough power to leave the solar system.

"They said to make sure it looked exactly right, and that there might be other parts that looked similar," said Nisa, "We won't get paid if we bring the wrong ones back!"

"We should just bring them all back," suggested Azda, the young man who stood guard with her. Tall, gangly, dark-haired and morose-looking, he wore a black tunic and light sandworm-leather armour and carried a shortsword that pulsed a dark purple aura, revealing that it was psychically augmented. Black and silver were their company colours. The older woman carried a pair of slicers, thrown weapons that looked like razor-sharp metal boomerangs and tended to result in your own hands being chopped off if you tried to use them without several years of training, "I know we don't have the space to haul them, but if we carried them between us and you used Ryuka..."

"I'd psychically exhaust myself making that many Ryuka runs! I don't know Nurvus or the Vahal Fortress well enough to accurately teleport there, anyway."

The only one of them who was not sick and tired of the whole operation was the Wren android, whose personality had not been programmed to include the capacity to feel work dissatisfaction. The entire venture sounded ludicrously improbable. They had seen the two androids fly in a space shuttle between planets, but to modify the craft with random centuries-old parts that they found lying around, then expect it to travel beyond the stars and not kill everyone on board? It sounded like the sort of thing that the company of rogue Hunters would try and do, not a pair of androids responsible for the maintenance of systems that kept the entire solar system from falling apart.

Wren and Demi had hired the independent mercenary company because they already had dealings with them, both good and bad, professional and less so, and knew from experience that they could be relied upon in a true crisis, if not with any kind of diplomatic relations with the official Hunters or civilised society in general. The androids also knew that the Rogues often sneaked into abandoned control systems and machine installations all around Motavia, salvaging equipment and turning the less hostile of the facilities into secret bases, where the authorities wouldn't try to tax their wages or question some of their less legal equipment. They also had one party member, a new addition, who theoretically might have some clue as to what they were looking for. Unfortunately, that theory had already been disproven. Their newly acquired Wren android, an even older model than the Wren who employed them, knew several secrets of the Second Era both lost and forbidden, but none of them extended to long haul spaceship maintenance.

Something moved, making a rattling, clanking noise as it did so. Abruptly stopping what he was doing, the Wren android carefully placed the engine part on the most stable-looking part of the floor, then drew his laser pistol.

"Wren, stop getting paranoid at the slightest thing!" protested Nisa as the android jumped from the crate pile, "It's probably just a rat again. Don't just put the box down! What if it slides off? What if you accidentally..."

"Hostile mechanical activity detected," replied the android. Then he pointed to the ceiling and began charging up his pistol to maximum laser strength. Three seconds later, which he actually counted out with precise timing on his fingers, the roof exploded inwards in a shower of rust, girders and cables, along with three fully functional Browren androids and two heavily armoured bat-shaped Goldine-class hover drones. Intruder alarms on the Goldines went off, then the five robots began shooting at everything in the room.

Wren took down the closest Browren before it could even land on the floor, burning a hole in its chest plate with a laser beam, cracking the red glowing power core that he knew to be the weak point in Second Era humanoid androids. Dry crackling and an ozone stench filled the air around him and he sprang out of the way just as Azda's Gigra activated, crushing the two Goldines inside a well of gravity that was compressed so tightly into one tiny space that it was impossible for the drones to escape as they were turned into a neat pile of dented gold armour plates and snapped cables on the floor. The tinier components were ground to glass or even vanished into the gravity well when the technique was finally dismissed. Nisa threw both slicers at one of the remaining Browrens, hitting it with the first in its leg to stop it moving so fast, then the second in the same spot that she had seen Wren hit it. The first strike wasn't quite enough but it didn't move fast enough to prevent the second. One of the other two Browrens aimed their laser rifle at Wren while the other activated an energy barrier module around them. Wren began to move back, firing as he did so. His shots were being absorbed by the barrier but he knew that the energy on those modules didn't last forever, and that Azda was preparing for another technique.

"They've summoned reinforcements! We need to leave!" the Wren android told them. Already, they could faintly hear answering calls to the sirens, and the rumbling clanks of machines that had to be very large to make that loud a noise from so far away.

"Grab the cargo!" ordered Nisa, throwing a slicer at the head of the Browren who tried to get too close to the device balanced on the crates. Wren grabbed the device and engaged his own barrier, hoping that it would last out against all the fire he took while he had both hands full and couldn't fire back. Servant androids to AI tended to shoot at high-grade AI that they considered to be hostile before any other potential targets, as they were easy to recognise as large threats, being assumed to have capabilities similar to their own highest ranking officers and to be capable of hacking and other electronic warfare. Motherbrain, the original creator of these long-forgotten robotic complexes, had been especially paranoid about the existence of AI not under Her direct control, as her entire purpose was to directly control all of Algol under one network. This particular facility had even been the site of a prototype attempt to build a second, improved Motherbrain, because apparently the fact that a supercomputer was faulty in ways that had caused several environmental catastrophes, was intervening in the day-to-day lives of the entire planet's populace so much that they were becoming institutionalised and had virtually no ability to survive independently of the system, and that it had gotten itself possessed by at least one evil entity from beyond the stars, did not dissuade people from trying to build another one.

"I thought these things weren't going to wake up again!" Azda complained to Wren as they ran. Nisa was calling their other two companions over their communicators. The huge, wild-eyed, axe-wielding Motavian called Enma had stayed behind to guard the Landrover and make sure their youngest team member, a twelve-year-old boy called Digo, didn't wander off and get into any trouble. He was old enough to accompany the others on missions but he wasn't ready for potential combat scenarios yet.

"I'm afraid I misinformed you. I genuinely believed it was impossible for there to still be signals on Motavia awakening the systems. Perhaps some of them didn't shut down when the signal from space disappeared," he suggested. He stopped when a door to the left of him exploded, shattering his energy barrier, and a Dominator-class robot, ten foot tall, vaguely humanoid but almost entirely covered in thick armour plates, stomped through the gap. It pointed the laser cannon mounted on its right arm at Wren.

"Mind the cargo!" screamed Nisa, grabbing him and attempting to pull him out of the way. A light blue glow suffused him as she grabbed his shoulder and the laser bolt slammed into another shield – a Deban psychically generated protection field – deflecting the shot from its intended target, which would have removed his entire chest and, most importantly, destroyed the cargo, so that it only threw him backwards across the corridor. Wren felt the device that he had wrapped himself around lurch in his grip as he picked himself up off the floor. His arm dangled uselessly, prompting a flood of error messages. He had lost its use and, as he tried to walk forwards and track the movements of the Dominator that the other two were desperately pelting with techniques, he realised that his arm wasn't the most vital system that was damaged. His optical sensors would probably go out entirely soon, then he would not be able to see what was about to deactivate him permanently.

A loudly bellowed Motavian battle cry managed to register on his also fading auditory receptors, then he heard Nisa yell, "No! Not inside a building! Not again!"

A pair of large hands grabbed him and pulled him into an indignant heap in the back of the Landrover, which then reversed sharply in the opposite direction. By the sound of it, the vehicle only just managed to leave through the same hole in the wall it entered, rather than making a fresh one. He heard all of the armoured vehicle's weapons fire in succession, over and over again, until the clamour ceased altogether and the Motavian began cheering and firing a few shots off just for the sake of it.

"Shutting down for maintenance," declared the android. He could still feel the weight of the device under his arms. The mission was a success. For now.

They would not know peace for long, he knew. The Dominators were supposed to protect the inner complex and only actively seek out attackers when a system was being invaded by a perceived major threat. Either the danger to Algol was about to return in full force, or it had never truly left.

Part of him had known this was about to happen, but he had never imagined it would be so soon...


	4. Chapter 4

Finally, the stark white void was gone and Rune floated in merciful darkness.

He remembered running until every muscle in his body felt as though it was on fire. Time slowed down to a crawl until it ceased to have meaning for him, every second of his continued existence snatched back from the inevitability of destruction at the ravenous maw of the searing light that devoured the world around him, threatening to swallow him too if he didn't keep moving. Pain racked his body from the sheer strain of being in proximity to the enormous power, a sickening, over-saturated version of the light of his own spirit, too great to even masquerade as the Sa-Lews he knew before, who had been an individual with something approximating a personality, not this monstrosity. His mind was dulled from exhaustion as he was forced to concentrate hard to keep his psychic shields up, to buy him just a few more seconds' time. All space was the same, an endless bleached-bone plane whose radiance burned his eyes even when he tore part of his cloak up to make a blindfold for himself and pulled his hood tight over his face. He had no way to tell where he was going. All he could rely on for guidance was Le Roof's slightly panicked voice, telepathically directing him back to the teleport circle.

"It will not be a very accurate teleport but it will put you out of harm's way," Le Roof informed him, "I apologise. I needed to rush to complete the contact, and I still need to divert most of my power into shielding the Temples."

"I'm sorry I couldn't help you fight it," Rune thought in reply, "I even lost the communicator, so it doesn't really matter where I go, I guess. I hope they can find me."

"I suggest you look for a Dezolisian machine centre. You are not expected to fight something of this power level. The entity who attacked you is no longer Sa-Lews. It has been completely taken over by the Great Light."

"Can you hold the fort on your own?"

"I am not on my own. De-Vars is still intact and uncorrupted," Le Roof informed him, "I am not defenceless myself. Please complete your retreat. The door to the temple is ten paces forward. I will need to close and seal the door immediately after your arrival. Please hurry."

Rune thought he had made it, and this certainly was a different location to the alabaster nightmare that he had been running from. He only prayed that his escape hadn't been the ultimate, and that the relief he felt right now wasn't a symptom of the alluring surrender to death.

"This isn't death," a woman's calm, melodic voice told him, "Only darkness. You're safe now. I rescued you."

"Who are you? Alis?" he whispered, picking himself up and walking forwards through the fathomless blackness. Whatever it was, it supported his weight well enough and he felt perfectly fine, free from pain, although worryingly disconnected from his body. He saw a shadow move somewhere in front of him, a swift, lithe movement, darting in and out of view. He could not see anything to hide behind in this abyss. It surprised him that he could make out the shadow of the woman. It was definitely a woman. It looked and sounded like Alis. At first, anyway.

"No, you're not Alis," he corrected himself softly.

"Correct, I'm not," she said, suddenly descending from one of the enormous pillars that formed an avenue to either side of him, like the aisle of a giant's throne room. The Profound Darkness bared pointed teeth at him as she smiled.

"I still rescued you, though. You should thank me as you would thank her."

"What would you know of who Alis is to me?"

"Do you even know, yourself?" she replied, calm as if their conversation was perfectly everyday and friendly, "Why would Alis mean anything at all to you, if you insist you aren't Lutz?"

"What do you want from me? Are you going to possess me?"

"I'd rather deal honestly with you. Like I said, I saved you. We share a common enemy."

"My fight isn't necessarily against the Great Light."

"You want to save Algol, don't you? You want us both gone from the solar system, for all the damage to be repaired. He'll destroy Algol without a second thought, you know. He doesn't care about you one bit. Just the same as I care about nothing but killing Him. I couldn't care less if I have to leave the solar system for good, as long as I get to kill him in return. You could always put up the barrier again behind me. If I leave Algol before He comes here, Algol will be completely unaffected by the battle."

"If I could trust you even slightly, I might seriously take you up on that," said Rune, "Except that you do nothing but lie and deceive, and corrupt Algol just as badly as the Light. Anyway, Le Roof already told me you could destroy the galaxy if you fought head-to-head."

"And you'd take His word for it? When he admits his archive can be hacked? Okay then, at least let me give you some of my power."

"The power you use isn't yours to give. If I wanted to use it, I'd study it on my own. I will do, too. I'll watch over the night of Algol as well as the day, and learn all about its darkness. But I won't enter into any pacts with it."

"But you'll accept free help from the Light!"

"Not any more," said Rune, "Any power given to me by the Light, I'm going to relinquish it."

"And what if all your power was just borrowed from the Light?"

"I trust in myself enough to believe that's not true," replied Rune, "I believe that my power comes from myself, and from Algol, and that Algol is powerful, beautiful and unique in and of itself."

"I'm so glad that someone else finally understands," replied the Profound Darkness. Except, he suddenly realised that it wasn't the Darkness any more. The voice had shifted, as had the atmosphere in the room. Instead of creeping malice, there was only a sadness and loneliness that hit him with an emotionally crushing force that almost literally brought him to his knees. He grabbed the Elsydeon and propped himself up with it. Wait, why do I have the Elsydeon?

"It's been calling you, so I brought it to you," Doran corrected him. She looked a lot like him, enough to convince him that they were really brother and sister. Her hair was dark brown, unevenly cut back to the nape of her neck, as though she had been cutting it herself with no experience of hairdressing whatsoever. She also had no experience of combat or rigorous travel, which showed in her much softer scholar's features. It was impossible to measure her age after an unknown period of incorporeal existence, possibly multiple millennia. Despite being as tall as him, she she always looked younger than him, and youthful for her age in general. Her slate-blue eyes were as sad and distant as ever.

"Why would you hold that? You were... I killed you with it!"

"You don't have to say it like that, my spirit wasn't in a body anyway, and you didn't destroy it, so it wasn't murder just to send my spirit somewhere else! It just happens to be a place where lots of the people live here are dead," she said, bowing her head, "I like it in here, though. It's quiet enough to think. All the spirits of Algol remind me of the good days. It's like living in those days before everything hurt me."

"I'll make the world a good place to live in again," he promised her, "I honestly don't know how I would be able to put you back in it, though. Why does the sword want me, anyway?"

"Do you know that your soul isn't really in your body right now?" she said, "It's almost time for the Elsydeon to claim you."

"Wait... I'm dying? But the Profound Darkness said..."

"The Profound Darkness? What are you talking about? I've been here the whole time," she frowned, "Did you just accidentally mistake your own sister for the Profound Darkness? Are we really that alike?"

"I didn't... She was there... I saw her wings... she tried to tempt me..."

"Any idiot can put wings on a fake body," she said, stretching her arms. Silvery sparks played across them and suddenly a pair of bat wings tipped with spikes, identical to those of the Profound Darkness. Fluttering her new wings indignantly, she added, "And you know as well as I do that those words could just as easily have come from me."

"I thought you had changed."

"I don't change. Always remember that. This entire Universe can fall to the forces that are ravaging it and I will still be left here, the last thing standing. I've sacrificed everything that isn't part of my raw essence so I can resist those forces. If you did the same, you would have a lot better chance at surviving, you know," she told him, dismissing her wings with a click of the fingers on her right hand, "But I don't think I can be the one to persuade you. I'm not a people person. She would do better. And as she's here, she can really talk for herself."

"Who's 'she'?" demanded Rune. She smiled and bowed formally, sweeping her right arm around to indicate that he should proceed onwards down the corridor.

Identical rows of pillars that reached up to a ceiling too high for him to see, appeared to be moving past him rather than the other way round. The hazy, floating motion felt more like a walk through a dream. Eventually, the pillars ended at a giant throne of marble and crystal with a velvet cushion. Sat on the throne was a figure that he recognised immediately, not from the endless mentions of her in history books but with a worrying amount of warm familiarity. Her face held an eerie frozen countenance of regal grace, more like a statue of herself than her true likeness.

"Hello, Lutz," she said, smiling fondly at him, "So, you've come home at last."

"I'm not Lutz. This isn't my home. My home is with the living, in the Algol of the present," he said, then added as an afterthought, "That's not my sister!"

"You're very presumptuous, deciding what belongs where in Algol," she said, "The Elsydeon thinks you belong here. Where it can't almost lose you again."

"How is killing me the same as not losing me? What am I supposed to do for Algol if I'm dead? Only Doran can survive outside her body, and even she couldn't really do anything to save Algol!"

"She really did save you back there. Because of your sister, you held on to who you were, when the Light hit you, even though a lot of you was already part of the Light," she told him, "But she doesn't think she can save your body. We're all sorry, but your teleportation was intercepted and scrambled. Normally, your body would have been atomised. We managed to preserve it, even resurrect it as a basic living organism, but we can't put your consciousness back inside it. It really would be simpler just to abandon it and try to do what you can as a spiritual entity."

"Could you at least explain things to me properly? Where is this, if it isn't the Elsydeon?"

"It's a lucid dream shared between yourself and your sister," she explained, "The setting is hers, because she opened it up first and is maintaining it, but you're the one creating all the images. Myself, your sister, the Profound Darkness, this throne room, it's all your mental image of how such a thing would look. You'll be able to do this without restriction once you sever the link to the physical world altogether."

"Does that mean you're not really Alis?"

"The one you call Alis isn't fully here, no, but her consciousness is interacting with the dream as best it can, when the dream is so clouded by the perceptions of the dreamers."

"But that's not what Alis looks like to me at all! I know that's not what Alis would say to me! She would never ask me to voluntary accept death! She still has her original body in cryostasis! As for Doran, even she has something left inside her unconscious mind apart from darkness, and besides, she would chosen Myau, not Alis. Nobody will give me a straight answer when I ask whether the Profound Darkness is really here. I don't think any of you are really here, and I want to know who is deceiving me!"

"I'm not deceiving you, Lutz. You're stuck between teleport locations. There's nowhere for you to go. You have to turn and face this for what it is."

"Why can't you call me Rune, then? The real Alis can tell me apart from Lutz! She knows where the real Lutz is! Why did you just say 'between teleport locations'? That's different to a scrambled teleport! A scrambled teleport means you aren't anywhere at all and your teleport cancels out entirely! Not that Alis knew anything about teleport physics... I'll tell you who would know about my exact situation right now... the one who intercepted my teleport in the first place! Sa-Lews!"

"Are you really flinging a spell at me? You're going to kill Alis? You're going to attack your sister again?"

"Sa-Lews... you lied about me controlling this world right now. But not about this being my dream, and me being able to control it if I wanted to. The thing possessing you will only ever be able to create a twisted parody of Algol's dreams. Let me show you what I can create!"

Rune turned the Elysdeon's hilt in his grip so that it pointed directly at the phantom of Alis on her throne. Soft blue light rippled along the blade, parting the wind with a noise like crystal glass shattering. He was not a swordsman but the Elsydeon had never been merely a sword. It felt as light and comfortable in his hands as his staff. He still wouldn't know how to wield it as a sword but he wasn't about to use it himself.

First, he concentrated on the image of the throne, narrowing his eyes and allowing the image to blur and shift as his vision lost focus. As soon as he was no longer really looking at the image that was there, he willed the vague suggestion of an object to bend and shape into the form he wanted to see: Sa-Lews, an entity whose appearance he could recall perfectly from memory through years of remembering incantations to dangerous spells, and more recently, months of contact with little else but his Rykrosian trainer.

Swiping the sword to one side, he casually dropped it, at which point an image of Alis grabbed the hilt before it hit the ground without even coming to a halt. He had summoned the image from memory in even less time than it took for him to form Sa-Lews. He hadn't known he could do so – he had only ever seen Alis on statues. However, Lutz thought about Alis enough that the last vestiges of his presence in Rune's unconscious mind would include enough mental images of her to instantly recollect her appearance. He supposed that he should give Sa-Lews a little more credit – the part about Doran being the only reason he still existed was probably true as well. He suspected that it was Lutz's sister, rather than Lutz himself, who was doing things to his mind that meant he still had plenty of memories from thousands of years ago.

Bolts of light sprayed out from Sa-Lews' single central eye but the legendary swordswoman sidestepped them and kept on running towards her foe. At the last second, she sprang upwards and thrust the Elsydeon's blade, now shining as though it was a solid bar of silvery blue radiance, into the eye. Cracks ran down the sphere, then it broke apart like a glass egg, releasing all the light at once. The ground began to rumble. The pillars, the throne, Sa-Lews, everything was dissolving...


	5. Chapter 5

Rune woke up with a start, gasping for breath. His chest hurt. No, he corrected himself, everything hurt. He hadn't been resting peacefully, hadn't activated any kind of healing or protection at all, and he was in a place where there wasn't much air. Dragging his limbs off the ground was a concerted effort. He first reached out one arm and fumbled vaguely around in the air above him. Finally he smacked his hand into something, which he grabbed onto so that he could use it to hoist himself up into a standing position. His vision swam. Phantasms of his lucid nightmare still floated lazily through the back of his mind.

He wondered how much of it had been a real confrontation with a possessing entity and how much had been his own fears for the future of Algol, his worries over the things happening to his mind that he couldn't control, maybe some scattered and confused remnants of Lutz's personality. He supposed that other people could have been telepathically contacting him during his reverie, people who also caused him a lot of anxiety, whether it be because he wished he had treated them better, he didn't know whether they were on his side or not, or he was confused as to why he was still in contact with them at all. He had the feeling that he had been unconscious and defenceless for a long time. Instinct told him that this was not his intended teleport location and was probably a hostile place. He wondered who or what had been keeping him safe, and how he survived a badly botched teleport with everything more or less intact.

He could work that out at his leisure, preferably in his study at the Esper Mansion. For now, he needed to ascertain where he was, where the exit was and how he was going to get out alive. He dare not try and teleport again so long after a misdirected long-range transition, in case he was still suffering some quantum instability and it reduced the accuracy of further attempts. He felt too psychically drained to use any techniques more complicated than a very superficial healing, or conjuring a small light above his head so he could see where he was going. Soothed a little by the healing, his legs would hopefully hold out for long enough to walk to safety.

It was pitch black. After a search of his immediate area, he discovered that he was indoors, specifically inside quite a small room with a ladder leading to a trapdoor above him. The object he held onto for support was one of the rungs of the ladder. From the level of technology implied by the room's design, he guessed he was inside a machine complex. From the lack of lighting, any noises he would associate with mechanical activity, not even a service light to warn him that things had been turned off, this was either one of the abandoned facilities or Wren had recently been here to deliberately turn it off, meaning that it was too dangerous to remain running and he really shouldn't be trespassing on it. Whatever the case, a machine complex was always dangerous to explore when you were alone and your one defence mechanism was almost depleted. He grabbed the railing, pulled open the trapdoor and began climbing up the ladder.

The shaft was narrow and cramped, designed for people shorter than him. He hit his head on the wall several times while trying to shift into the right position to keep climbing. He pushed open the hatch at the other end of the ladder to find himself in a maintenance corridor. From the appearance of the robots that lay collapsed on the floor or slumped against the walls, this was a truly ancient facility, and whatever closed it down hadn't been a simple case of obsolescence and abandonment. Some of the machines had taken heavy damage, others with their weapon systems still active as though they had been firing before they were deactivated, others still with parts so worn out that they looked as though they had been wandering around aimlessly until their motors gave out. They were very dead, long past any hope of repair beyond replacing enough parts that it wouldn't be the same machine any more. There were few signs of nature reclaiming the facility, despite its age, making Rune think that it might be unusually well sealed off. However, he could hear the faint dripping of water and several hollow, clanking echoes, implying that he was quite far underground, as well as loud rustling noises that could be animals. He hoped they were animals. If they were biomonsters, he didn't think he could fight them.

He had never been in a machine complex so quiet. That said, he didn't know of many such facilities on Dezolis. Only two of them were accessible from the area the Landale had crash-landed in during their first emergency stop on Dezolis, and none of them had been vital to their mission. He knew that Dezolisian facilities were a lot more isolated in general, the weather of Dezolis making it difficult to navigate and prone to making large regions of the planet inaccessible to each other throughout most of the year. Wren had told him that Motherbrain hadn't stored vital components on Dezolis, probably because She was worried that they would be damaged by the harsh weather. Even Motherbrain could not control a Dezolisian winter, and She had lost control of facilities before, sometimes causing the deaths of human workers that She had been hard-pressed to think up explanations for while maintaining her image as flawless, infallible and firmly in control.

As he thought, walked down identical, featureless corridors and climbed up unstable-looking ladders, the only things he could really do in the silence and darkness, he began to hear more of the rustling noises, louder now, too loud to be small animals. High-pitched chattering noises echoed down the corridors too, as if they were calling out to each other, whatever 'they' were. If each noise was an individual, there were too many of them for comfort, and he was surrounded.

He hoisted his staff, not into an obvious battle stance but to a place where he could reach it in an instance if needs be, and diverted all his remaining energy into a Deban psychic shield. The noises were between him and the only remaining way up, which he knew had to be the way out. He could not avoid an encounter unless he wanted to be trapped down here, where there was nothing left but death.

With a furious hissing, clacking screech that sounded more like a demon than an animal, the first of them leapt at him. He saw them for what they were, now, and he knew where he was.

He really was in Hell.

* * *

They were still recognisably rabbits. Only just. Their beady red eyes glowed with the all-encompassing malevolence of the laser sights on turret drones. Their twitchy noses were covered in multiple layers of congealed blood from countless killings. Their once luscious white fur was now torn and stained with blood, filth and rot, parts of it torn off to reveal bone and innards. Their appearance and carrion stench reminded Rune of the ghouls that stalked Reshel during the zombie plague. He could tell even before he scanned their life signs that these were the walking dead. The closest rabbit to Rune bared sharp, pointed teeth that were mutated as they were turned into carnivores – no, into pure and simple murderers, their rage never satiated. He could see that they still possessed some level of animal cunning, were watching him and carefully manoeuvring into the best position to cut off all his possible escape routes. Individually, they were too small to be a threat to him, sharp claws and possible infectious zombie virus or no. In his weakened state, he didn't think he could take down an organised pack of them.

The pack leader pounced, and suddenly he didn't have enough time to think. Letting the barrier take the force of its spring attack, he smacked his staff down hard on its head, then twirled it around to knock two more out of the air. Devilish screeches filled the air and he registered four more behind him, about to rake their claws and teeth into his back.

Then there was another noise, much louder, a mechanical clanking and the whining of servomotors that shattered the silence. The rabbits instantly broke their concentration on him and gathered round the heavy locked door that had just been forced open with a force that threw it across the room. Some retreated from it and glared at it suspiciously, others poised to attack it. Then it came crashing through, a gigantic Cooley 61 industrial robot. Its form was vaguely humanoid with proportionally oversized, chunky, armoured limbs, a helmeted, featureless face, mining claws in place of its arms and an assortment of heavy ordnance attached to its back for self-defence or shifting unusually stubborn rocks. This type of machine was archaic, abandoned along with Motherbrain, and almost certainly hostile. It also confirmed where he was: Skure, the abandoned Laconia mine.

The robot swiped away the three rabbits that tried to jump it, its arms connecting with a force that could break rocks and had no difficulty shattering every bone in the small creatures' bodies. Whether or not a zombie rabbit could be killed, it rendered them unable to move. It aimed its micro-missile launchers at the rest of the pack, then fired. A few seconds later, Rune emerged from the filing cabinet he found to hide behind. Through the smoke and dust, he saw a hole in the floor where the rabbits had been. His psychic scan was useless when the rabbits didn't detect as life forms anyway, but nothing climbed out of the hole after two minutes of observation.

Which left only the robot. He glanced curiously at it. He had expected it to attack him already. There had only been one attempt at a large-scale mining operation on Dezolis and everything about it had gone wrong. They had accidentally hit a vent of poison gas which they failed to isolate, contaminating the entire complex. The gas had caused mutations in some of the pets that the miners had brought with them to prevent morale loss, turning them dangerously aggressive. After that, the failure to isolate the mine shafts had been discovered to have its roots in a wider automated security failure that caused the robots with security systems to turn hostile. The infected rabbits also began exhibiting strange symptoms where their flesh would waste away but never to a lethal extent – in fact, they became almost impossible to kill. The mine was evacuated but most personnel did not survive. Rune knew that there was nothing left down here that would not kill him on sight, whether it be biological or mechanical. However, there was the industrial robot, quite casually stood around examining its handiwork. Maybe it just decided it wanted to prioritise the killing of rabbits over humans today, he thought, smiling at the grim humour.

He jumped back and almost fell down the hole when a hatch opened up on the robot's chest and a man climbed out. The pilot was a male Palman with a weathered, world-weary face and short grey hair with a matching beard. He wore a simple blue tunic, trousers and fur-lined parka that looked fairly worn. Like Rune himself, his age was difficult to determine. The Esper had learnt to spot when personal temporal continuity wasn't a straightforward question and the man had the same aura around him.

"These things were manually piloted for years before they were automated, you know. They still made them with the controls to manually operate them. It would cost money to take it out, and you never know when the automatic controls might break down," he said in a broad Dezo-Palman accent as he inspected Rune, "You should probably leave. You don't look well and you don't look like you're equipped to survive down here. It's a very dangerous place. I can get you back to town safely."

The nearest town to Skure was Reshel, a fact that Wren theorised was partly contributing to its being hit by the zombie plague so fast, so long before the other towns. Of course, Skure had been completely sealed off over a millennium ago, the residue of the poison gas dissipated and the zombie rabbits culled. Now it was just a known site of rich Laconia veins. Some people had even tried setting up smaller mining operations again, and so far nobody had died from it. Or so Rune had been told. Questions raced through his mind, all clamouring to be asked at once, and his instinct was to interrogate the slightly shady-looking individual who knew far too much about surviving in forbidden places. However, it would be imprudent to risk insulting the man who had offered to lead him safely out of such a dangerous place, and who seemed more than capable of keeping his word. Holding his tongue was not something that came naturally to Rune and he knew he would risk slipping out something sarcastic if he said too much, so he just smiled and thanked the man.

"What the hell are you doing down here anyway? I thought nobody else knew the ways in and out."

"Teleport accident. Faulty Escapipe," he said, referring to a technique-imbued disposal mechanical device that could teleport a small party out of a dangerous situation once and play nice music in the background while it did so, "As for normal ways in and out. I didn't even know there was such a thing."

"Yeah, there aren't supposed to be any," he frowned, "Whole world's gone to hell. Even found bunnies inside the town walls a few weeks ago. Gonna be another plague unless we do something about it."

"What are you planning to do about it, then?"

"Take advantage of the new resource. Go salvaging down there. Get some more bots like this one fixed up. Teach people how to use them. I guess I'm the person who has to do it, under the circumstances..."

"What do you mean?"

"Hm? Well, I'm the only person who knows how to survive in Skure, I mean," he said, "To be honest, I've been salvaging from the outskirts of that place for a long time now. Yeah, I know how illegal that is. You won't report me, right?" his robotic frame whirled around and flexed its claws, "We can't help each other get out of here if we don't co-operate. And it's not like anyone else can use the information."

"Don't worry, I have no interest in the law or the salvage business. But, forgive me for asking, why wouldn't someone else be able to survive here if they really wanted to? It'd just take a large party and the right equipment. You might need more than just being the first to think of it, if you're going to protect your territory. People might even think there's still Laconia down here!"

"Oh shit, you know about the Laconia too," he sighed, "Look, I'm not just selling all this to the Dezolisians on the black market or something, you know. I use it to make weapons for the people of Reshel. So we can fight back. Or sell them to the Espers in exchange for healing services."

"Wouldn't it be more practical to have more people helping you, then?"

"I'm not letting anyone else risk their lives in Skure!" he snapped, pointing the robot's guns at him.

"What makes you think you'll survive on your own? You're only one man, even though you have a robot helping you. What if you fall down a mine shaft and get stuck?"

"I'm not going to fall down a..." he sighed, "Look, while we're down here and nobody can hear us, I'll tell you the truth. There's clearly something strange about you, so I want you to tell me your secret in return, okay?"

"Sure. It's not really a secret, I just didn't want to waste time talking about it," he shrugged.

"It's not like we have anything else to do, we're still a long way from the exit," he said, "Anyway, you're right, I have other things about me that make me able to survive in Skure."

"Such as what?"

"For one thing, previous experience," said the gruff stranger, "Not just from living in Reshel. I was there during the original Skure crisis."


	6. Chapter 6

"That would make you over a thousand years old! Nobody lives that long!"

"You sound very sure of yourself," he said, his robot's head tilting curiously as much as it was capable of, "You got your own experiences of that kind of weird shit, I gather. You an Esper?"

"Yes, I am. But our lifespans aren't that much longer than Palmans, you know. We just... we're involved in some projects that have been going on for a lot longer than any of us have been alive, and some of us have memories of people who were alive a lot longer ago than us."

"Musk Cats do that, too," he said.

"How the hell do you know about that?"

"I was there before they retreated into the caves. Hell, I helped some of them retreat into the caves!"

"You know, that's halfway convincing. That wouldn't be something you'd know about just from picking up a history textbook. And your life signature is kind of odd."

"It's a mutation. A stable version of the mutation in the bunnies. I had something a little messed up with my genes, something that always flashed up on the clone labs but never got anything done about it because it wasn't going to cause any problems," he said, "It stops my cells from degenerating but doesn't cause my flesh or my brain to rot. I guess I must have been bitten too many times, or inhaled a heck of a lot of that gas."

"How do you avoid just going crazy from being alive so long?"

"I don't. Quite a lot of the time, I'm pretty much not in control of what I do. I think it's the same as you... there's a project going on, I get calls, I have to get involved with it. I wasn't that sane even before this happened to me. It's how I managed to escape. When Motherbrain started dumping shit on me, I was able to mentally break off my connection to her. Back then, most people wouldn't be able to even think of the possibility that she might be malfunctioning, or that she might even deliberately try to kill one of the people under her control. It meant that you were wrong, crazy, even a criminal. It was like thinking that your mother was evil."

"Do you think that Motherbrain was deliberately trying to kill the people in Skure?"

"I know so. The mines have plenty of emergency gas venting systems, the evacuation protocol takes a tenth of the time it took on that day, the bots didn't have malfunction lights on them when they were killing people. The shuttle took off before everyone had been located. The Data Memory terminal had been turned off. That gas has never been discovered naturally occurring on Dezolis again."

"Before that time, I didn't know I had this gift. To break the effect of mind control. Some of the people that kept visiting me, kept talking in my head, wanted me to hone that ability. They gave me specific things, things that I haven't heard of before and just sounded crazy to me, but they insisted it was something that was a threat to Algol, and they asked me to learn how to resist its influences."

"Were any of the presences you were told to resist called 'Dark Force'?" he asked.

The man nodded, "That was the most difficult of all. As a reward, they told me that Dark Force was the source of that gas. It was the same thing that caused the plague in Reshel. I asked if it was inside me, too, and the things keeping me alive were evil, but they said it didn't matter as long as I was able to resist the corruption of Dark Force."

"If that was true, I'm highly surprised that you're still alive," said Rune, "Who is that contacted you about all this?"

"The Musk Cats. The Espers. Rolf's friends and family. Sometimes I get visits from Dezolisian monks. They're not the kind you normally meet on a day trip to the Temple."

"Well, this is all very new to me," said Rune, "I always thought I was specifically supposed to be told about things like this. But no, nobody tells me anything!"

"I don't know who you think you are, to have privileged access to all the solar system's secrets, but I always got the impression that people like me exist because things went badly wrong. When things can go that wrong, the solar system starts wanting secrets, even from the people who used to be important to it."

Rune laughed. It was the sort of thing a peevish Rykrosian would say. Or possibly Doran in a bad mood. There wasn't all that much difference between Doran and a Rykrosian.

"Come to think of it, I did meet one person that old. Well, two, but one was an android. But the other was... well, not really a human any more, but..."

"Most people who know me call me that. A 'not really a human any more, but...'."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to cause any offence."

"None taken. It's perfectly true. I'd like to meet your other friends."

They had been travelling for a long time now, stopping occasionally to force roving packs of rabbits to retreat, moving ever upwards in a winding maze. Sometimes they were forced to change direction due to a collapsed or blocked tunnel. This meant that Rune's peculiar guide was forced to plan the rest of the route out from the start. However, they eventually reached a jagged hole cut into the thick titanium wall – by a Cooley 61's mining claw, from the looks of it – from which hoary sunlight and a light snowdrift poured.

Shortly after Rune pulled himself up out of the hole, he looked up at the sky. Even in the midday sun that reflected off the ice sheets with so much glare that it would blind anyone who looked at it – this was apparently a warm and pleasant season for Dezolis – the phenomenon that caused Rune to look sharply upwards was clearly visible. It almost took up the entire visible sky and it was lighter than the sun's rays, such that they were quite dulled by the comparison. It was also a seething, roiling vortex of chaos that spread across the sky like an astral cancer. Before Rune's eyes it made an animal hissing noise and expanded further into space with an explosion of limpid tendrils.

He knew what it was. He had seen one very like it before.

"Sorry if this sounds ungrateful," he said to the man who had begun to climb out of the robot's cockpit and had stopped to stare at the sky, at first incredulously, then with a certain amount of thoughtful concentration, "But could we go back inside for a moment? Now, you said there were communication terminals..."

* * *

Several hours beforehand, Wren had already begun to examine the same celestial phenomenon but the tools he used to scan the affected area of space were considerably more sophisticated than his eyes or his memory, mechanically augmented to near-perfection though they already were. The Zelan Space Station was equipped with scanners that could reach far out into space, picking up readings as far away as the borders of the solar system, detecting for a wide range of energy sources, unique signatures such as life-forms, and every single recorded possible threat to Algol that had ever been encountered. Wren was directly neurally linked to the scanners (although Demi was better than him at setting this up) and could receive feedback from its readings instantaneously, taking only a second longer to transmit a command to the station's defence systems and prepare a response to any perceived threat. Although this was the most extreme example, abnormal readings suggesting a major incursion had been increasingly prevalent in the last year or so, meaning that Wren had been bolstering defences as well as overhauling the Landale. He even impressed himself with how many guns he had managed to fit on the comparatively small shuttle.

The latest development confirmed his suspicions. It had occurred suddenly and spread swiftly, around five minutes after the sun rose over Aiedo, a fact he had observed through watching the rotation of Motavia's moon and wondering when Demi would next contact him. The team she had hired on his behalf to salvage the necessary components of a warp drive for a small shuttle had apparently been successful in their mission, although there had been combat – an unusually large and organised security team had been activated by their presence, yet another suggestion that outside influences were once again about to interfere with Algol's peace – and Demi had feared that the parts may have been slightly damaged. They were usually made durable. Warp drives were a very bad part of a spaceship to malfunction because they were suddenly jolted, even compared to most. Once the sensors began picking up the initial waves of the event, the readings all immediately jumping off the charts or showing absolute null values when it shouldn't be possible, he found he had more to worry about than a damaged part that he could repair later. As for Demi, she contacted him straight away to confirm that she, too, had seen it, and that it was clearly visible everywhere in Motavia.

He guessed straight away what it was. Zelan's data banks had only one record that closely matched the phenomenon, although the type of energy involved in this massive fluctuation that warped space and time around it and opened a wormhole to another dimension was of the exact opposite structure. Where the enormous release of energy associated with the Profound Darkness, caused by the entity breaking a thin crack in the seal and brushing the tiniest portion of its essence against the material dimension, had absorbed all light, this energy equally reflected light. It was the antithesis of the first energy wave but Wren knew that it was equally capable of destruction, merely through its size, intensity and the animosity of the sentient being that caused it. Any celestial bodies engulfed within its spread were probably already lost. At least this portal had not opened on Motavia's surface, destroying a large patch of land between Piata and Mile and infecting everyone in Mile with a deadly plague, as the last one had. While it was much larger, it was, to the best of his knowledge, in the middle of dead space. It didn't really reassure him, though; the phenomenon was spreading. Once it was large enough to swallow the planet, it would be perfectly in range to do so.

Demi had wanted to make sure that Nurvus was capable of defending itself in her absence before she returned to Zelan. As well as the resurgence of the hostile robots from the machine centre, sightings had begun of extradimensional monsters similar to those brought to the planet by the Profound Darkness. The Hunters' Guild had already mobilised to counteract the threat and the Rogues that Demi had hired also said they were going off to protect their planet. She felt that, in the spirit of good partnership, she ought to arm them with at least something that would give them an advantage, even if it meant loaning that crazy Motavian the other two vehicles.

As Wren waited for Demi and patiently double-checked that all his guns were fully charged up and in perfect working order, he didn't expect to receive another communication. He remembered that Rune had a communicator that connected him to Zelan and that the descendant of Lutz would probably be required to join the front line of this battle, something he would need Wren's assistance for, but he didn't expect the call to come from a location in Dezolis. What was more unexpected, the communications terminal warned him that there was a weak signal at the other end, that the device sending the signal was a hacked terminal that was malfunctioning, and that it was a high-level security breach for a signal to be sent inside a dangerous area that should be sealed.

As the Dezolis-based complex had been completely shut down, without even a tracer signal left behind, in case there was a possibility of it reactivating again, the only way to scan it down and determine its exact identity was to follow the procedure for a completely new, unidentified finding. After it had been rediscovered and, with some persuasion, identified as a machine complex, he was required to hack into the system's control computer when a strong firewall, put in place by one of his precursors who apparently believed they would never have a reason to return here, ever, assumed he was a malicious influence trying to reactivate the complex and started scrambling his scan results. While it had been intense, involved several sophisticated calculations that no Palman brain would have been able to perform at that speed or inputted at that speed with only two arms and no direct neural link to their computer, and ran the risk, if he failed, of activating what might be a factory full of berserk military androids for all he knew, it had only taken ten minutes, after which he responded to an only mildly bored-sounding Rune.

"I thought I'd never get through to you on this piece of crap! The signal's awful. Sorry about that," said Rune.

"Rune, why are you calling from Skure?"

"Teleport accident," someone else replied in a gruff voice, "I can't believe we actually got this thing up and running! Are you really on a space station?"

"We don't really have time for this!" complained Rune, "Wren, something's seriously up. I think I might need everyone's help on this one."

"I noticed," said Wren, his voice as deadpan as only an android without anything more than the simplest of emotion chips could manage, "I will take the shuttle down to Tyler and meet you there."

"Look, I'm psychically drained – like he said, teleport accident – and I'm having difficulties getting back through the way I came. I don't suppose you could meet me here? I know I'm not supposed to be here but I promise I had nothing to do with it not being sealed up and you're going to have do something about it eventually anyway."

"What exactly do you mean, you cannot return the way you came?"

"It's a long story, and I don't think it was a good idea for you to just hack straight into..."

The elite Esper's voice was drowned out by the slightly crackling blare of the sirens of very old security androids, then a very loud rumbling sound that the speakers of Zelan's communication terminal had difficulty reproducing. Wren shrugged, grabbed three of his largest laser cannons and ordered the Landale to prepare for immediate take-off.


	7. Chapter 7

Unseen eyes watched the Landrover screech to a halt outside the gates of Kadary, raising a cloud of sand that obscured the sight of the strange crew that emerged from the vehicle. The guards of Kadary reacted to its arrival, which they immediately spotted due to the noise of its roaring engine, the occasional rounds accidentally fired from its main railguns, the yelled arguments in both Motavian and Palman, the drunken swerving path that it made across the desert and the fact that they had been told specifically to look out for a vehicle of that particular description and markings. Vehicles of such advanced technology were rare but quite often seen coming to and from the strange machines on the outskirts of Kadary that were suddenly so active. The Rogues tended to customise theirs with new paint jobs, this particular one being of a woman dressed in rather revealing Rappy-themed outfit complete with antennae and tail feathers, loudspeakers with a selection of theme music and added guns. Orders given to the gate guards were to allow the Rogues free access to the town but not to encourage them to longer, to keep track of their movements at all times and check the inventory of all the shops they visited for any suddenly missing valuable items. Mostly they only bothered entering the city to buy more supplies, to advertise for more work or to go to the pub. For reasons unknown to the town officials, the Rogues preferred Kadary over any other large settlement on Motavia when it came to plying their trade. Maybe the town's shady history made them feel dark and edgy, even though it was mostly peaceful these days, or maybe it was that it was sufficiently close to Aiedo to actively compete with the Hunters but there was still a large mountain and a tunnel infested with giant, aggressive blue slugs between the two Guilds if the much larger Guild did decide to take strong exception to their presence. Whatever the case, they were also rowdy when drunk, they had been known to steal from shops and there were suspicions that at least one of them was practising black magic, so it was considered one of the duties of the town guard to keep an eye on them.

Today, only one of the Rogues who stepped out of the vehicle headed towards the town gates after they had finished discussing their next move and bidding their farewells. The dark-haired young man with the shortsword didn't usually visit the town on his own. He was the second least experienced Rogue and the rest of the Guild were worried that some of the locals, who were often distrustful and hostile towards the Rogues, might see him as easy prey if they wanted to discourage them from visiting. His social skills were poor and he wasn't good at bartering so there was no point in him participating in the shopping trips or looking for work. Instead of looking nervous, however, he looked straight past the guards with a determined gaze, not even trying to excuse his presence, as though he had an important mission to run that couldn't be held up by bureaucracy. There was a look about him that made people step out of his way. Psychically sensitive people in the crowds, however, found themselves unable to stop staring at him.

There were certain individuals who even began following him to his destination at the other end of the city, although it was no simple charismatic attraction. They hadn't planned to be here today but other forces had been planning for them, strange visions, often in dreams, inspiration or sudden life revelations, arranging them to have subtle mental compulsions to come to Kadary. These were often twinned with sudden increase in ability in the use of psychic techniques but these individuals had known they possessed some exceptional innate ability in that area already. In fact, they often attributed their latent powers to the strange dreams.

Then there had been others who were trusted with the direct knowledge of why they were supposed to be in Kadary at this particular time. Most of them hung back, acting more subtly, or had also joined the Rogues and were thinking up their own individual reasons to enter the town.

While Azda was about his business in the town proper, Demi, the passenger they had been paid extra to escort, headed back to Nurvus. The rest of the Rogues returned to the current Rogue Headquarters to organise the Guild into what would be an ongoing campaign that required everyone to co-operate, treating any other assignments as secondary priorities to the new mission. They were being watched, too. While they were all of interest to the owners of the invisible eyes, two in particular caught their attention. The Wren android who had been so badly injured in the last battle already began preparing himself for the next. Demi had used her unique repair functions to fix the most obvious of his damage, then loaned him some tools to finish the job once he was back in the workshop. Still, there were some more delicate parts of his circuitry that would take a little time to repair. His role in the upcoming battle would not be one of direct combat, however, although there was always the chance he would need to assist in their efforts to protect him on the way there. Hacking a hostile machine complex and overriding the malicious orders yet again would be dangerous, not only because of the physical defences, but because of the risk that he, an older model that still contained parts created during Motherbrain's era and therefore at increased risk of hacking, might be controlled in return if the job went really badly. A Wren-class android working for the enemy would be disastrous but he was the only person who could have possibly pulled off the operation.

To the silent observers, he was not the most interesting person in the Rogue Headquarters. Digo, bored of the tactical lecture that his trainer was giving him, had drifted off. The place where his mind went to when he drifted off was particularly vivid today.

Meanwhile, other eyes on Dezolis were watching the tall Esper and the grey-haired man operating the mechanical giant as they fled from the mines. Before they reached the entrance, the shuttle had arrived on the icy plateau, making a difficult landing without a proper docking bay. The heavily armed android who emerged from the shuttle door then headed into the gap in the wall to clear a path for them. An hour later, they emerged together, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. The restored Cooley-61 rained down volleys of missiles upon the rogue machines while its twin electrified claws swung like the scythes of two Grim Reapers, tearing through the deranged, diseased rabbits that had been waiting in the darkness and growing in number. Wren's Photon Eraser flashed blue and unleashed a photonic pulse at an Aerotank that had tried to drop on them from a shaft overhead, punching a hole straight through its armour and out the other side and deactivating it instantly. After they had emerged from the mine, the stranger sped off down the hill to the town while Wren and Rune returned to the shuttle.

The eyes kept their attention on the man with the ancient machine as he approached the gates of Reshel. The townspeople had not seen the robot before and the guards instantly drew Laconian swords in defence of their town. He drew back the cockpit to reveal his identity, then pointed to the hill and told them to start gathering weapons. Someone began running to Meese to warn the Espers and get a message sent to the Temple.

He had seen them before but they chose not to reveal themselves to him right now. They had their own part in this. They flocked into the central chamber of the network of natural caverns underneath Dezolis that were their homes, each taking a place around the central raised dais where their leader curled up in meditation. Their thoughts reverberated around the cavern as they psychically linked themselves together, their mixed excitement and apprehension vibrant and difficult for them to dampen out of respect to its volume in the heads of the others. Their leader, the Old Man, projected a formless mental signal that caused the front of the hollow dais, its seam too tight to spot its existence, to rumble away, revealing their secret that had been hidden for millennia.

Apart from their own comfort, there had been another motive for them to hide away in the warm, dry caverns that were easy to defend from the few predators. Nowhere else would be suitable for them to store their treasure over such a long time. Each of them picked one of the small, smooth, acorn-shaped nuts and placed it inside the Laconian pot they wore on a Laconian chain around their necks. It had been a long time since the most famous of their species had struggled to unscrew a bottle that had been tied around their neck by a Palman hero of similar legendary stature. By now they had evolved solutions to problems like that, and had survived a lot worse. Now was the time for them to show how much they could contribute to the defence of their solar system.

Their baskets filled, the cats formed a line and walked in a slow procession towards the cave mouth before heading out across the wide plateau and onto Dezolis' highest hill, where the moon was about to rise despite the aberration blocking the sight of its passage through the sky.

At the same time, the Dezolisian priests and monks of the Temple paused in their duties. Each of them had felt something at the same time, an inspiration, a silent call, a strange notion. Their intense spiritual training meant that they often picked up the unseen phenomena behind Algol almost immediately and had these thoughts in unison. Most of them had already been praying for Algol's safety or forming a ritual circle and preparing protective magic to cover the Temple and their revered Bishop. They understood the import of the twisted light in the sky. While it was still referred to as the Temple and treated with the same respect, the original building had been destroyed in the last battle with such a gigantic threat to the solar system. Even with all the monks working around the clock together with a team of builders from the neighbouring town of Jut, they had no chance of rebuilding it to its former majesty in time, so they had to make do with a humbler chapel to protect the inner sanctum, the vaults underground where the leaders of the Church and the most holy relics were protected. The freshly unbanished Priest Raja always joked that he preferred the more modest building as it was less effort to cast protective magic over a smaller surface area. They had no time to rebuild now in any case, only to pray and to wait. And now to sing.

Every one of them, down to the youngest disciple, had been given the mental urge to step outside under the stars, raise their voices to the heavens and sing of times gone past, times that would remain immortalised by collective memory, a spirit that would only grow stronger through their unwavering faith. Some of them hadn't even taught the traditional songs that they were singing, some hadn't been told of the legends of the First Era yet, none of them except possibly the Bishop were old enough to remember the events that inspired the songs. However, as their collective voice reverberated across the ice wastes, they felt the veil of warm darkness, of eternity, of stories whose origins were older than the stars.

The light in the sky writhed, its tentacles lashing out at the sudden pain it did not understand.

On Rykros, Sa-Lews and De-Vars battled on. As one had been forced by the possessing influence to remove all limiters, the other had followed suit in order to have a hope of defending itself. To prevent the corrupted entity from trying to destroy Le Roof or making a mess of the scenery, De-Vars' first act was to drag him to a nearby flat basin of shimmering crystal dust, formed by a meteor that hit Rykros the last time the shields failed. The celestial archivist himself devoted all His spare power to preserving the integrity of its data banks against the presence that forced its will into the world through the gap where Sa-Lews was, threatening to fill Le Roof's data banks with a series of warped events and images that were of something wholly unlike the world that the minds of Algol's people could inhabit.

However, this was not his primary action. His mind was foremost engaged with transmitting a signal across Rykros, a spark of activation that would find any remnants of the fallen, almost destroyed fourth Rykrosian and bring Her back into full existence. He had been capable of doing so and possessed the authority, as the ranking Warden, for a long time now, but had been waiting for the most appropriate time, so that the enemy did not know that the option was available. Of course, most of the essence of the entity that had once been Re-Faze had been consumed by the Elsydeon when it had been struck by the blade in a desperate attempt to free it from corruption. The ploy had worked, but not enough of Re-Faze remained to incarnate them as the same entity again. Fortunately, quite a lot of the essence still existed in another form in the Elsydeon. Extracting it would be easy.

Extracting it without waking the Other would be more complicated...

(In the inner sanctum of the Esper Mansion, where the Espers were preparing to move out, the Elder felt a sudden surge of magical power and sensed an unusually strong psychic signal from the vaults. When he went to check, he saw the Elsydeon flare with a deep red aura.)

Red vortices of energy whirled, collecting with them wind, fire and stone, gathering them into an increasingly violent tornado until they could no longer be seen, until everything crashed together and then fused into its rightful place – a new body of darkness, flame and stardust, an entity born of the very essence of Algol.

"Re-Faze! An intruder is present that must be driven away," said Le Roof.

Spinning around on Her axis, the newly risen Re-Faze unleashed a beam of pure destructive psychic energy, a living Megido technique, from the ruins of the Anger Tower on one end of a mountain range to the arena-like clearing on the other.

Half an hour later, everyone in Motavia who had the potential to use Dark techniques was assembled in the old Church in Kadary. It had been turned into a museum and memorial centre so that the people of Kadary would know not to be corrupted by evil supragodlike entities again, presumably because they thought it might help, but everybody thought it was creepy so nobody visited it. The curators were satisfied by the explanation that it was a group of students as most of the visitors really were in the middle of studying at the Piata Academy when they heard the call. It was mostly the younger, mentally gifted generation who learned unusual techniques.

As they gathered, now a little unsure what they were doing in Kadary or what was happening to them, a too-bright cloud opened and a bolt of darkness hit the spire of the Church, sending energy crackling through the ground. Tremors shook the Earth as the magic that saturated it flowed up again in invisible wells, flooding the senses of the waiting crowd.

They realised just in time what kind of power had been unlocked within them by the sky and earth as the first wave of monsters were sighted by the lookout up on the watchtower, converging on Kadary. The monsters were truly alien shapes, so slick and strangely rendered in the physics of the Universe that they were almost gelatinous in appearance, glistening with a pale, sickly light, their features half-formed and asymmetrical, one limb a pseudopod with a mouth, another a short, stubby leg with a claw. Some flew on skeletal wings, others loped along at speeds they didn't look capable of. This was not the first time they had been sighted and bands of Hunters already sent to track them down. However, they now had purpose other than random killing and draining the life out of their surroundings by existing in a world that couldn't support them. Kadary was their goal. Drawn to their antithesis in order to consume it, they did not realise it was wielded by a myriad of intelligences who would use it to kill them.

In the sky, a flock of golden-furred, white-winged felines twice the size of jungle cats, never mind the house pets they had once resembled, spiralled towards the maw of the pulsing white void. Clear it of the invaders that came through but keep it open, had been the orders of their ancestors, whose spirits still lived on. Keep it open for the ones brave enough to fly through.

Meanwhile, the first voice of the falsehood had been heard, the Mother of the New Order, the false voice of Alis who would replace her. The minds rose up to defy her: the thousand year old man from Skure, the child Digo and the ageless Doran.

All the pieces were in place, the next stage was ready to start, so the eyes changed their focus again.


	8. Chapter 8

"Are you sure this is going to work?" asked Rune, staring at the viewing screens on the bridge as they displayed every room, along with all the bizarre modifications that had been made, their status and time before they were ready to activate. Demi explained the design to him while Wren made some final checks to all the vital systems on the Landale, giving the command to activate each one in turn. The outward appearance of the small, fast shuttle, with its sleek curves and silver paint job with blue highlights, hadn't changed that much except for the addition of three extra layers of armour plating, four railguns, two missile launchers, a photon cannon and a set of new scanners. Inside, there had been several new additions. What had been a storage room for engine parts had been opened up to the engine room and turned into a bracket for the completed warp engine, which looked suspiciously like a giant Escapipe covered in coils of glowing green cables. The shield control room also contained several rows of new panels, including a device that looked more like a full-screen communications panel and soundsystem. Most puzzling to Rune was the addition, in what had been a cargo bay of a giant ring of solid Laconia that floated in the middle of a glass booth filled with pale green light.

"Many of the new devices are based upon the Rings of the Stars that we were given by Le Roof when we were first given the mission to infiltrate the Edge of Darkness," explained Demi, "Once reverse engineered, the Rings turned out to be simply a psychic technique energy storage and amplification device, set specifically for travel under heavy protection. Techniques that offer both shielding and protection at once existed during the Second Era, although they were not in general public usage and were lost from the Algol Solar System. We recreated the device on a large scale."

"Wait... you dismantled a Ring of the Stars? How? Where did you even get one?"

"While the four that we used were immediately reclaimed by Le Roof, the faulty Rykros Ring, which was never usable and thus never activated, did not register as needing to be returned. I wished to research the concept of devices that merged technology and psychic phenomena – as you know, I was given the functionality to emulate a healing technique but I am aware that fully psychic androids once existed. My ambition is to upgrade myself using the blueprints of such an android and use my new abilities to compensate for Wren's extreme weakness to psychic techniques. As I was the fifth excursion party member, and as such, was given the remaining Ring, I managed to keep it for further experimentation in private."

"And you succeeded in creating your own legendary magically charged device? Without anyone noticing? Not even Le Roof?"

"This is not an original construct. We recreated the exact physical structure of the original Ring on a large scale, then slotted the original into it so that the technique would be conducted into the larger device once we applied large amounts of psychic energy into it. We hired technique-users to charge the device with energy."

"And they said yes?" Rune felt himself becoming increasingly exasperated. Somehow, it felt profoundly sacrilegious for the androids to do such a thing without consulting any authority on the matter, and he felt even more pessimistic about the security of Algol if Le Roof couldn't even spot androids who were central to Algol's defences from performing such experiments right under His proverbial nose.

"I would be very grateful if you would agree to assist us with the research in future, as your extreme command of your psychic powers would make the process quicker and easier," she said, "You seem apprehensive of the project, possibly because of the security risks involved. Let me remind you that I was not the one breaking into Skure."

"That was an accident!" he protested, "And I'm worried about you as well! Do you understand that a lot of things out there are very dangerous for androids in particular? You could become corrupted too, and yet you're planning to fly in there using this untested jury-rigged mess..."

"There is no way to test the device without actually performing a jump out of the solar system, that does not run the risk of us transporting our only ship without us inside it. We have protection against corruption," she pointed to the shield room, "Apart from reinforcing the counter electronic warfare systems, we also created a type of energy barrier that specifically counteracts the method we saw being used to corrupt intelligent life-forms on Algol. That method being simple subliminal viral meme – in other words, information. The shield we use picks up information that contradicts or reinforces the opposite of the corrupting information and transmits it throughout the ship. It is similar to how a human would counteract brainwashing, except that it can be directly transmitted into our logic centres through our neural links to the ship, can transmit images and video sequences, and can override our control over our bodies in an emergency. For some reason, we recently found a large amount of suitable information being broadcast all over Dezolis. We believe it to be the planet's natural defence mechanism but we are using it to our own ends without in any way jeopardising its original function."

"That's great, but isn't it going to stop working once you get out of range?"

"Not if we record the footage. It takes up a great deal of our ship computer's processing power but it is preferable to our corruption."

"And what is this?" Rune demanded, pointing at the warp drive.

"Essentially, a giant Escapipe."

"You do realise that isn't how Escapipes work, right?"

"Actually, there are recorded cases of faulty Escapipes creating spatial distortions that, if stabilised, could function as wormholes."

"Oh, so it's a faulty Escapipe. You... do remember what happened to me when I failed at teleporting, right? And I had an unnaturally strong psychic talent keeping me from dying outright."

"That's a different type of teleportation failure. This specific type of faulty Escapipe does not have lethal consequences, although it did create a logical paradox that removed the user from the space-time continuum. If it reassures you, the warp drive will only be used during the return journey. In order to depart from Algol, we are planning to fly the shuttle through the rift."

"I'm so reassured," said Rune, "How in Alis' name do you know for sure that the Ring emulator will work in practice? Don't tell me you have some kind of fake spatial rift as well!"

"We have only been able to test the device using remaining resonance from the Edge of Darkness on Mile. The experiment worked on a small scale. We can think of no other way but to use the portal. It is the only method by which we would reach the other side of Algol's seal without taking several hundred years," said Demi, "And we have at least seen entities travel through it without being destroyed."

"Your ship isn't the same as a monster that's probably a manifestation of the Great Light anyway!"

"Indeed, but they are physical objects. I have observed them being destroyed using conventional weaponry," said Demi, "The basic rule that physical matter can pass through the portal safely should also apply to a spaceship."

"In any case, we are scheduled to lift off in twenty four hours," Demi informed him as she began adjusting settings on the bridge controls, "Please pass the message on to Le Roof. I apologise for causing security concerns on Rykros. I did not think that one clearly identifiable shuttle would be a risk."

"Are you two going to be okay? I think that Le Roof will be more worried that the two androids in charge of Algol are leaving the solar system," said Rune, staring out towards the portal of light in the sky.

"We would rather that Motavia and Dezolis be well defended in our absence than take a large force with us on this mission that only requires two of us. Although we will not technically be alone. We will have an escort up to the portal and we will be in constant communication with Algol."

"What are you actually going to do up there? You can't fight the Great Light on your own! We only barely defeated the Profound Darkness with a party of five and very specialist equipment."

"Our mission is not to directly attack the Great Light. We do not even know of its form, never mind how we would go about fighting it. This is a recon mission," said Demi, "Specifically, to meet up with possible allies outside Algol."

"You've already been talking to people outside Algol?"

"Not a proper conversation, no, but the outlying stations near the borders of Algol's seal have been picking up radio interference that sounds like an attempt to converse in Palman. The pattern of the interference sounds like deliberate jamming, possibly by the Seal itself. However, we know that this is not the tactic of the enemy. The Earth invasion fleet requires a breach in the seal to send ships through, not just close proximity and powerful communication devices. From what we've heard of the Earth fleet, if there was a neutral third party, they would also be attacked, especially if they were trying to become involved in the Algol invasion. Earth is trying to use its technology to warp the very reality of space, so they would be greatly disadvantaged if they had to leave gaps in order to accommodate neutrals."

"So, you think these people are in trouble too?"

"If their communications were not requests for help, they could at least be persuaded that we have mutual enemies," said Demi, "There is also another possibility. They are clearly aware of us through some means, even though our solar system has been sealed from the rest of space for thousands of years. We do not know what happened to the few survivors of Palma that actually managed to leave the solar system."

"You think they may still be alive out there?"

"By now, they would have gone through multiple generations," said Demi, "We do not know what their civilisation would be like. But, at heart, it would still be Palman."

"And they would have more of an idea than us about how to survive whatever else is out there," said Rune, "Your mission sounds absolutely crazy, you're mostly cobbling together theories with hardly any evidence, but I hope you succeed. You're right about one thing: Algol does need help. Right now, we're just weathering the siege, barely able to defend ourselves. We're sitting on a whole load of ticking time bombs from thousands of years ago. Someone has to actually go out there and you sound like you have the best idea so far as to how. I'll tell Le Roof your plan and come back to you tomorrow. I know you're just going to leave without my permission anyway, so I'd like to at least stop myself getting into too much trouble."

"Feel free," said Demi, turning up a large dial on one of the navigation computers.


	9. Chapter 9

By sunset on Dezolis, the Altiplano Plateau was littered with the corpses of rabbits that no longer rose from the dead and the twisted wrecks of deranged mining robots. Led by Raja, the entire town of Jut had joined in with the psychically projected prayer-singing, as had the Esper Mansion. The transformed Musk Cats were positioned in a ring around the void, some of them already fighting small skirmishes with monsters on its border who had spotted them. The ancient Wren android had disobeyed his orders given by both Demi and the Rogue commander, and gone back to Nurvus to make sure it had at least one control android. After all, facilities could be hacked remotely, meaning that not only was Nurvus vulnerable to hacking, it could be used as a hacking terminal itself by a resourceful Wren android. The rest of the Rogues formed a protective circle around the legion of dark wizards who kept the invaders from reaching Kadary and, more importantly, Nurvus. Rune had left Rykros, where De-Vars and a newly resurrected and rather overenthusiastic Re-Faze had neutralised Sa-Lews.

Rune returned to Zelan and the Landale to find the shuttle about to lift off. Demi and Wren were surprised to see him holding the Elsydeon and wearing a determined look on his face. They were even more surprised when he announced that, upon the orders of Le Roof, he was coming too.

The first sign that they were drawing near to the rift was when the music began to distort.

Rune had been watching the patterns of the snowstorms over the surface of Dezolis, worrying about the amount that the rift had expanded already and how close the edges were getting to Dezolis' orbit, when he first noticed the change. At first the change was slight, a feeling that maybe the volume of the soundsystem was just a little high, then it sounded more as though something was interfering with it, that it was running out of power or that it had never worked from the start. However, instead of giving out altogether, the sound began to become clearer and more recognisable again, before becoming more chaotic, as though it was fighting against another song that was trying to replace it. The Esper deliberately hummed along to the Algolian song, forcing himself not to listen to or think about the other. It didn't feel evil or harmful as such, more like something that was weakening him, sapping his energy and morale, by its lack of any substance at all. It was like something precisely manufactured to be the opposite of the other song, something calculated to fill the space where it was and drive it out. It was identifiably music, quite powerful and complex music, and the thing that disturbed Rune about it the most was that it contained a few of the same bars as the music it was replacing, so that someone completely new to the solar system might not be able to tell the difference until it was too late. It was as if an alien intelligence had glimpsed the soul of Algol and attempted to clone it without defect, but with their own entirely alien view of what counted as a defect.

Power was diverted to the soundsystem and it rapidly began to stabilise. Demi turned up volume just in case, until it began to reach slightly painful levels for the non-android crew members. Seconds later, Rune saw the first of the tendrils of light begin to brush gently against the shields like the venomous tentacles of a jellyfish. Where they touched, the surface of the shields, which were segmented into hexagons of solid green light, began to warp, giving them the appearance of glass that was melting and being smeared away in random directions. The Ring Emulator began to spin faster around its axis, the light it emitted growing brighter and broader in hue. Rune found himself having to resist the urge to hold his breath, instead folding his hands and praying to Alis. He was well aware that Alis was not, and had never been, a Goddess, but his mind needed the extra peace that the meditation of prayer would bring, and his morale needed the reassurance of the aspect of Algol that were supposedly embodied by Alis: its purity of its spirit and of its unbroken cycle, the eternal flow of its grand legends as it was challenged by evil and defied it each time, no matter what form the evil took.

Sirens blared as a pack of monsters that mostly seemed to be made of bony, bat-like wings, snake tails with sharp spines and impossibly wide razor-fanged maws, spotted the ship and flew towards it, firing cones of lightning from deep within their gullets or spraying smaller balls of lightning as they wound in spirals through space. The shields began to fizzle and grow dull in places as they absorbed the damage, made worse by several tendrils of light that were trying to wrap themselves around the ship. Wren retaliated immediately, the ship's railguns tearing five of the fiends apart before the missiles had even reached their target, leaving only a fine mist where three more of them had been. A noise like oily screeching and hissing together with the clacking of crab claws was faintly audible over the communications channel before it was automatically overwritten by the music. It was the sound of reinforcements, as several more packs had noticed the commotion of the battle or smelled the blood or however the bizarre creatures sensed things (Rune refused to believe they were even supposed to exist within this dimension's laws of physics). Aware that they couldn't really hold up to a serious confrontation, Wren set the engines to full speed, burning towards the eye of the void before too many things could arrive to stop them.

As another pack began to approach missile range, something else intercepted them: four giant, sleek feline figures with silky golden fur and broad-feathered white wings. Two of them spat and hissed as they clawed and bit their enemies, shearing off wings, limbs and heads with the Laconian blades they had strapped to their claws. The other two hovered with their eyes closed, a powerful psychic aura invisible to the naked eye building up around them. One of them was shielding the other three, Rune recognised, the other one was about to throw a fireball at the enemy. Their technique was ancient, possibly even First Era. It was like watching Myau fight. Damn it, he told himself, you wouldn't know what Myau looks like! You're not Lutz!

Oh, hello there, meow, are you joining in all the madness too? I thought I should come out and have a look. It isn't like I can sleep with all this racket going on. My people are doing a good job by themselves, so I'm not intervening except to remind people that we ever existed. Cats don't really forget important things like that, though, only Palmans, meow. Your sister got let out, by the way. She says hello.

"She's not my sister!" Rune accidentally exclaimed out loud, "I'm not Lutz! Isn't he in there with you, anyway? Why are you even in the Elsydeon if you can't stop wandering out to talk to other cats every five minutes? Wait, what do you mean, Doran's been let out? What's happening in there? Hey, don't just purr down my ear! Answer me!"

Rune's protests were drowned out by a deafening silence as the ship reached the centre of the maelstrom of light and was pulled down into the abyss. The music he woke up to was strange, something he hadn't heard before, but it was definitely still the music of home.


	10. Chapter 10

Rune was no longer on the ship, that much was certain.

At first he thought he was dreaming, or maybe trapped in yet another world of his own distorted unconscious by a possessing spirit. He had journeyed deep into a portal that connected the Great Light's consciousness to the physical world and there was always a risk that the Great Light might be able to contact him more easily and possess him, despite the security measures. The scenario he saw before his eyes was not unlike the world constructed by the Great Light.

There was a baroque look to it, full of gigantic stone columns and archways, that reminded him of the throne room where he had met the fake Alis. Elaborately carved friezes conveyed flight and long journeys, bird's wings, the passage of seasons and the positions of celestial bodies. He also saw images of people who looked to be in positions of great authority, tall, imperious-looking, stern-faced men and women in long robes. Some of the designs reminded him uncomfortably of Dark Force, as drawn by people who didn't quite know what the entity looked like. The room was terraced but there was no way to reach the next floor without walking down long, wide corridors. Silence followed him, that of a long sleep that he felt an urge not to disturb. Soon he found himself wandering through indoor gardens of miniature trees and flowering shrubs that were an icy blue-green colour and looked as delicate and brittle as if they had fossilized. A similar garden existed in the inner sanctum of the Esper Mansion but on a much more modest scale. Still, Rune was already beginning to feel homesick. It wasn't as alien a world as he imagined but his spirit, which was so strongly tied to his homeland, already began to feel the difference...

So, you managed to make it here...

Rune flinched, his head darting around. He had only seen the vision out of the corner of one eye but it had still been quite distinct; a tall, slender, beautiful woman who could have been Alis, except for the braided golden hair...

"How are you feeling, Rune?"

The much more immediate and lucid voice of Demi brought him back to the present. She had bent down behind a tree but was now visible as she stood up. She had removed a clipping from a branch, taking care to avoid damaging the alien flora more than necessary, and was placing it inside a cavity in her chest that apparently existed for the precise purpose of storing fragile research material. Rune was surprised that she let him see her with such a cavity open; the android had been programmed to feel uncomfortable exposing her internal workings in public but apparently this did not extend to storage compartments. Chaz and Rune had always believed it was because she was programmed to imitate human female personality traits, until Wren revealed that her component parts included some prototype systems that were still being kept secret until the final release date. Rune now wondered if that was something to do with her attempts to give herself the capacity to use techniques. He also wondered where Wren was.

"I'm fine," responded Rune, taking another look behind him. The woman had vanished. She had seemed very real for an illusion, but that could have just made her an unusually effective illusion...

"That's good news. It backs up the reports from the scanners. I was a little worried we had changed environment too rapidly for them to recalibrate. If the atmosphere really does fully support human life, we can start to rely on their other findings," she frowned, "They are rather odd, though..."

"What are we doing here?" he asked. If Demi was here, it probably meant he wasn't stuck inside his own unconscious mind. This could be his own secret perception of Demi but he doubted he spent that much time thinking about the android to have such a clear mental image of her.

"A teleport misdirect, I believe," she said, quite cheerfully, "Although, I don't understand how we could have been moved independently of the Landale. The Escapipe was set up to teleport the ship, not its crew! Not that it makes any sense for it to have activated at all without my command..."

"A teleport misdirect. Again. Oh joy..." Rune sighed, "Have you at least seen Wren?"

"I was hoping you had seen him. No sign of him on the scanners. Another anomalous effect. I've never heard of an Escapipe that doesn't teleport the entire group to the same place, but of course, with some misdirections..."

"Well, we found each other, so that's a start. Why don't we go and explore some more? With luck, we'll catch up with him eventually," said Rune, trying to move the topic away from teleport misdirections, which made him feel a little queasy.

"Good thinking," said Demi, heading off in the opposite direction to the way Rune had come from. By the look of it, she had taken a third side passage to reach the garden. How big was this place?

"Did the scanners detect anyone else here?"

"No human or android signatures at all. This place is clearly artificial, though. In fact, my scanners are convinced that this entire environment is artificially constructed. We are most probably on board a satellite or a very large spaceship."

"Funny-looking spaceship," said Rune.

"We are only seeing a small portion of the structure. I would need to travel extensively to even pick up an idea of its shape, although I have my suspicions," said Demi, running her scanner over a stone wall that had vines of the same colour as the trees trailing down it, "We do not have the time for such a venture at the moment, however. Our priority should be finding Wren, then returning to the Landale. While I don't know where our ship is, I am still able to communicate with it and activate its autopilot systems, presuming that nothing untoward has happened to the ship."

"If there are people here, they might be the ones who sent the signal."

"There certainly aren't enough personnel to maintain a satellite such as this, even if a skeleton crew remains. This place is almost entirely automated," commented Demi.

"Still, I think I saw someone earlier..." mused Rune.

Normally, that would be a good idea, but unfortunately...

Rune turned his head to regard the voice that whispered to him. This time he thought he saw Rika, or someone very much like the Numan, springing from one end of the corridor to the other. However, this woman looked older, her hair a vibrant red rather than Rika's dark pink, her ears that of a normal Palman rather than the dark-tipped feline ears of a Numan.

"Rune, I am picking up Wren on the scanner. This way," Demi pointed down the corridor where Rune had seen the Numan. Now there was no sign that the stranger had ever been there. Had he seen Wren and mistaken him for someone else? The lighting was low and the far side of the corridor a fair distance away, but it would take more than an optical illusion to mix up Wren and Rika.

"I certainly hope it was not Wren moving like that," commented Demi when he admitted what he had seen, "I am concerned that he isn't remaining calm. I do not wish him to start an unnecessary conflict by misinterpreting a situation."

"This atmosphere is enough to make anyone paranoid. Heck, I'm probably just seeing things," he laughed nervously and scratched the back of his head.

"It is possible that you are picking up on psychic phenomena that my scanners cannot detect."

"Ghosts, you mean? Looks like that sort of a place," he agreed.

"Lingering psychic resonances from an entity no longer in residence, or some other extremely subtle or unusual use of psychic energy. I can detect psychic energy but your mind is a much more sensitive tool. I can only tell that such a thing exists in the area."

"And you're picking up readings?"

"Only a low-level blanket reading. The problem is, as far as I can tell, this could easily be generated by yourself. Please do not drop your background techniques," she told him even before he thought of it, "You will need all your defences on hand in an unfamiliar environment. If there really are incorporeal entities, or somebody watching us under a psychic cloak, we don't know it isn't hostile."

Or this really is an illusory world, thought Rune. With all the twisted versions of his allies, it was looking increasingly like the effect of his earlier possession. If Demi and Wren were also being possessed, or hacked, it was possible that a powerful psychic could create a plausible consensus reality from their memories of shared experiences. It was unlikely, especially between a biological life-form and two androids, but he once again found himself doubting the reality of everything he saw.

"Wren! Over here!" yelled Demi as the combat android wandered around the corridor, a frown of confusion on his face as he held his own scanner out in front of him with one hand, photon eraser tightly gripped in the other.

"I'm glad to see the two of you safe. You wouldn't believe the readouts I'm getting from this place."

"It's confusing me too," said Demi.

"I'm afraid it isn't confusing me at all. I know exactly where this is and it makes perfect sense. I'm just surprised to have reached it in such a manner. The information is too old to be on your database unless you're specifically looking for it but I'm sure you'll have heard of it."

"Please update me," said Demi.

"Of course. This is..."

Now you've come here, I'm afraid there's no way to leave...

Rune ran around the corner and towards the foot of the stairs that led up to the next terrace and were surrounded by its high wall. The stairs were wide and the figure was able to casually lean with his back against one wall and his legs stretched out, as if waiting for something. He was an android, one of the lighter models, more like the older Wren but not yet painted to look humanoid, its hair also a fiery red. Unsettled by his insistent, slightly menacing tone, Rune drew his staff and began charging up a Nawat technique. Wren also pointed his weapon at the stairs, then looked around at Rune, his expression even more confused. Rune pointed at the spot on the stairs again, then looked around to find the other android gone.

"Rune is seeing things," explained Demi conversationally, "Now, where did you say this was?"

"It's a First Era Palman generation ship," said Wren, "One of the emergency evacuation fleet."

"How far out is it? Did we make it out of Algol?" asked Demi.

"I would need the ship's scanners to pinpoint our location," said Wren.

"This isn't Algol," muttered Rune, still watching the stairs suspiciously.

You should not have been able to reach this place. What have you done?

"I guess this means your theory is correct," said Wren, "I don't detect anyone around who could have sent a signal, though!"

Rune took care not to look up at the source of the voice, in case it was the thing that triggered the apparitions to vanish. Instead he whispered, ignoring the androids, "Who are you?"

We are a lost chapter of your history. We are lost outside space and time. If you came here, it means you could be lost too.

"You didn't call us here, then?"

We can't communicate with the outside world any more. Even if we could, it would be suicide. The enemy has overwritten the space where we were.

"The Enemy? You mean the Great Light?"

"Rune, who exactly are you talking to?" demanded Wren.

The Great Light knows that this place exists. That's how it lures people into its grasp: it makes them think that the new world is the same as our world. It uses our image as an illusion. When it comes back, it'll find you and corrupt you too.

"You don't feel corrupted. What's keeping you safe?" demanded Rune. The ghost's words explained why he had seen this place in the vision that threatened to corrupt his heart. This was probably the first that the Great Light had seen of Algolian civilisation since its exile.

The accident that projected us out of space and time also sent us too far away from anything the Great Light can manipulate. It was ironic, really. If we'd found a way to send everyone on the ship here... but then they might never be able to return to the real Universe.

"Are you talking about a teleport accident? Like the one we just had?"

Ah... that may explain it... after the first accident, this probably became a localised point of least resistance.

"We haven't found anything else sucked in here!"

It is rather an out-of-the-way place. We never got very far.

"You know where we are?" he turned to face Wren, who was starting to look irritable and slowly turn up the settings on his gun, "They had a teleport accident, like us. They can't interact with our world any more."

"That explains it! I can scan for spatiotemporal anomalies. It would have to be an extreme one to allow no communication with the outside world," said Demi, "I wonder if it was one of the original prototype Telepipe experiments?"

"They say we don't have much time. Our enemy might know we're here..."

"No energy signatures matching the enemy detected," reported Wren, "How about you, Demi?"

She shook her head. Then, after a few seconds, the female android's scanners began to beep wildly, "Massive anomaly detected! Pinpointing it... it's overlaying the entire ship! I'm picking up several life forms inside it!"

"Can you communicate with them?"

"It would waste less energy for Rune to be an intermediary," said Demi, "Although, it makes no sense that Rune can speak with them."

"It's because I have the Elsydeon. These are still the legendary heroes of Algol, even though they're in exile. It makes sense that I can speak to them through the sword," Rune told them.

"Actually, Rune has been through a total of three misdirected teleports in a short space of time compared to our one. It could be that he is simply closer to their state of existence than we are. I would advise not being involved in any more accidents if you do not wish to actually join them," Wren told him.

"Thanks, I'll bear that in mind," muttered Rune, "So, guys, can you tell us where we are, exactly? You haven't seen our ship, have you? We can't get out of this place without it."

I'm afraid we can't find out where your ship is. We can tell you a rough estimate of where our own ship is in the galaxy, although it tends to drift.

"If they give you the co-ordinates, can you two call the ship?" he asked the androids.

"I'm afraid I've lost contact with it," said Wren, "It is highly improbably that the vessel even survived."

"Oh, great," Rune sighed. Then a loud explosion sent him off his feet. If Wren hadn't grabbed him, he would have flown across the corridor. The androids were much more stable on their feet than he was. Wren's gun was extended and he was charging it to maximum power, looking around for the correct thing to shoot.

They've arrived! Get out of here while you still can!

"Mind telling us the way out?" he yelled over the clamour of a second explosion and a wall collapsing on a higher terrace, sending rubble clattering down behind them. The whole structure was precariously close to falling on their heads or trapping them inside the room, at the mercy of whatever was attacking them. Wren took point and Demi held the rear as they made their way as fast as they could down the corridor while keeping a cautious eye out for enemies. Rune translated for the ghosts as they relayed the directions to the emergency shuttle bay. They had no idea if the shuttles still worked but without the Landale it was their only hope. The shuttle bay was close to the outer rim of the colony so it was also most likely to come under attack first. Rune let them know colourfully what he thought of that design choice, even as he ran down a flight of stairs, hurling Nawat techniques at the enemy they were now sighting for the first time. The ice-based technique was one of those less likely to destroy the spaceship, compared to manipulating fire, electricity or gravity.

Rune was surprised to see that the enemy was human. He had expected more of the Great Light's monsters. However, it wasn't all that much of a shock. The Darkness had used plenty of humans in Her plans, and Rune recognised these people. No, he corrected, clutching his head and swearing irritably, I do *not* know these people! Those are Lutz's memories, not mine!

Lutz had fought them inside the Spaceship Noah. They were from Earth.


	11. Chapter 11

If another explosion hadn't rocked the ship at that precise moment, the salvo of laser rifle fire would have hit Rune as he jumped down from the balcony of the stairs, which were structurally unsound from the last tremor. Wren provided Rune with a few rounds of covering fire with his Positron Bolt unit, vaporising the four unfortunate Earthmen who had almost hit his comrade. Normally he wouldn't have used it in the narrow corridors of a spacecraft but the place was falling apart anyway; it might even turn out to be necessary to blast their own escape route into an outer wall. There were already several holes in the ship's hull but they were crawling with a seemingly endless supply of Earthman boarding troops. Impossibly tall even by Wren standards, they wore large cloaks, crimson or black, over heavy space armour, almost entirely concealing their features. Rune (or rather, Lutz) had seen their faces before and knew that they were basically human, if rather alien in a lot of their thought processes, and possibly some of them were female and needed a better collective name, but these particular Earthmen wore combat helmets, perhaps believing this mission to be more dangerous than the security breach on the Noah. Or maybe they had just pre-empted the amount of rubble that would fall on their heads. They had wanted the Noah preserved at all costs; they wanted this ship demolished.

"Phononmezer in 5... 4... 3..." began Demi as hatches in her armour's shoulder plates opened up to reveal devices that could emit noises at destructive frequencies and at a lethal volume. Wren turned off his auditory sensors and strengthened his energy barrier. Rune amplified his own magical protection and disabled his hearing using a weaker, selective Shimb technique, then jumped behind Demi to be on the safe side. It was difficult to focus the mind to use techniques without rites or incantations but it was a skill that a battle wizard picked up after a while. He didn't even drop his Hewn technique for a second. The dull clanging of the Phononmezer unit still managed to slightly seep through his magically induced deafness. The attack shattered the wall to the right of them, doing even more unpleasant things to the unit of Earthmen standing between the wall and the androids. Behind the gaping hole, Rune saw the shuttles lined up in their hangar, not that different in design to the Landale. Of the twenty in the hangar, six of them had been struck or even buried by falling masonry and four of them were being fired upon by the Earthmen, who did not want there to be any survivors. Wren indicated the shuttle closest to them that he thought would still be in good condition to fly, then they ran towards it, pursued by the surviving Earthmen behind them and the enemies who ran to intercept them from the shuttle bay. Demi fired off burst after burst from her Sonic Buster, a heavy pistol that was essentially a small, localised, less messy Phononmezer, while Rune summoned more columns of supercooled air. The priority now was not only to keep themselves alive but clear a path to the shuttle and stop it from taking any vital damage.

"No doubt, they will have a craft ready to intercept us. Full speed ahead and prepare for evasive manoeuvres as soon as we're inside!" yelled Wren as he inputted the commands on the terminal to lower the stairs and open the door to the shuttle. This was a simple process, as it was the same model as the Landale he was used to working to, the ancient controls were still fairly primitive, had no security system requiring electronic identification and, being pre-Motherbrain, had not yet been taught to shoot at strange androids on sight. The shuttle bay door controls were unlikely to still function, and in fact looked like they had been deliberately fired at, so Wren decided to obliterate them entirely, along with the outer wall that the door was fixed to, by expending every last charge in his Positron Bolt unit. The remaining shuttles, the wall and a small interceptor frigate that had been attached to the outside of the wall were also removed; a Positron Bolt was a formidable weapon. At the last second, Wren jumped inside the shuttle and slammed the door shut.

"We're leaving," Rune explained to the unseen watchers.

We can see that. Please leave quickly. We're going to make sure you aren't followed but you don't want to linger and be caught inside.

"Caught inside what?" asked Rune.

We had a spare Escapipe left over. I don't know how it managed to cross over with us.

"Oh sh... Wren! MOVE!" he barked. Unused to having orders yelled at him apart from occasionally Demi, Wren gave a slight shrug of his shoulders as he lined the ship up with the hole in the wall, then cranked the afterburners to full power.

The music came back on. Demi had reprogrammed the Phononmezer unit to also be a secondary possession prevention mechanism. 'Rise or Fall' blasted through the rather cramped bridge of the shuttle, even as the ship sped away from the flaming wreckage of the ancient colony, three giant battleships chasing them, their designs angular and menacing like a hawk hovering above its prey. A volley of missiles slammed into the ship, taking down the shields instantly and almost slamming Rune's head straight into Wren's as he leant over to see the little red crosshairs on the view screen more clearly. They were too far away to view the pursuing ships but they had no idea if that meant they were out of the enemy's targeting range. One more volley would destroy the ship. Rune grabbed the hilt of the Elsydeon, still bound securely to his waist under his robes, and prayed to Alis, even though he knew she hated it.

Then there was an explosion that dwarfed the previous blast, even though it was nowhere near their ship but rather in the epicentre of the colony they had just fled from. The sound was suddenly muted by what looked like a ripple in space itself, as though it was a pool of water that had been disturbed by a giant hand plunging into it.

"That's a gigantic spatiotemporal distortion! Get clear of its event radius!" cried out Demi.

The ship couldn't actually fly any faster and they all knew it. All power unnecessary for life support was already diverted into their engines and the ship's current speed was threatening to cause problems with structural integrity to the rather battered ship. Rune closed his eyes again, praying for just a little more of the favour of the legendary ancients. Somehow, they got through. As Wren announced this, the Esper thought he saw the face of the girl he had mistaken for a Numan, smiling at him, her features radiating with soft blue light. Then the Elsydeon flared the same blue and Rune saw motes of light drawn to it from points all over the space occupied by the anomaly, a flame surrounded by tiny sparks. He heard their voices, now finally at rest, rejoining their peers in eternal spiritual defence of their true homeland.

When the ripple reversed itself, everything it touched was dragged inside with it, pulled into a dimensional rift. The Palman colony, the Earth ships, a small asteroid field they had flown past, everything was stripped away. The shuttle's sensors were no longer even picking up trace regions of subatomic particles. They may well have been switched off every time they were pointed at the region that was now as cold, dark and empty as death itself.

"We should go as far away from this region as we possibly can. The paradox backlash will not destroy us but it could cause any number of other unpleasant effects," said Demi, "Whatever caused that distortion must have been related to the fate of the original crew, maybe weaknesses in the space-time continuum that never quite healed."

"They did the same thing again," said Rune, "They had a second Escapipe. They sacrificed themselves and their ship to let us escape and take down as many of the enemy with them as they could."

"The loss of life must have been catastrophic! I wonder if they were destroyed or they were lost in another rift, even more removed from physical space," said Demi.

"In my experience, war is always unpleasant. For both sides' sake, it should be avoided where possible," commented Wren, "They would have used similar weapons against our entire solar system, given the chance."

"Then we have to use the opportunity they gave us," said Rune.

"To do what, exactly?" enquired Demi, "I can't determine where the enemy came from. I don't even know where we are now."

"Any ideas?" Rune asked the sword, placing his hands on the pommel and closing his eyes. Other than a surge of energy that was generally uplifting, there was no answer, until Wren suddenly broke the silence.

"I'm picking up readings from a cruiser just entering scanning range. We've got company!"

"Friendly or hostile?"

"I've no idea," admitted Wren, "It's identifiably a mechanical ship with life forms on board it, but I've no record of a ship like that ever existing in Algol or coming from Earth. I believe we're about to meet real aliens!"

* * *

As the unknown cruiser came into view, Rune was surprised at how unspectacular it looked. Jury-rigged from the parts of multiple other ships, it mostly just looked functional, designed for any occasion. He spotted a few protrusions that could be guns in its otherwise fairly smooth, organic design, what looked like eggs that an insect was laying but could be extra storage space or fuel cannisters, or a separate hangar for a small flight of drones that flew around it, occasionally welding a slightly loose panel in the ship's hull or wandering off after something that looked like salvage. For its casual appearance, it was moving respectably fast. Rune knew not to take it lightly, even though it clearly wasn't a combat ship. It had some firepower to their precisely none, was still larger than them and wasn't in an absolutely terrible state of repair.

"We're being hailed," announced Wren as they began to decelerate and approach the ship. He received the call on the communications terminal and an entirely human face appeared on the view screen. The stranger was more heavily built than a Palman, looking more like a Dezo-Palman who had spent his entire life surviving the tough Arctic climate. His hair was a grey that usually only came with age to a Palman, except that it was thick and lush, flowing down his shoulders as he gave them a curious sideways glance.

"How the hell did you just survive that blast?" he demanded. The structure of his language was similar enough to Palman for the ship's computers to decode, although the translator had an annoying atonal voice and a bad habit of not being able to tell homographs apart.

"We were lucky. We were far enough away before it happened," explained Demi. The computer translated the message back into a rough approximation of the other speaker's language that gave Rune the impression that he would be wincing if he was on the receiving end of it.

"Lucky, my ass," he smiled a rather wolfish grin.

"It's true that we were given some warning of what was going to happen," said Demi, "We certainly didn't cause it, if that's what you think!"

"If I thought you were capable of that, I wouldn't have gone near ya. Your ship looks pretty beat up," he replied, "I could repair it, but it'll cost ya."

"We're from too far away to have anything you'd recognise as money, and we don't have any equipment or anything we can sell to you. We lost our own ship. We only have what we need to survive and finish our mission."

"Then it'll cost ya information,"

"We can share what we know, that doesn't jeopardise our mission. Don't forget we have no reason to trust you either!"

"let's start with business. There's nothing worth salvaging, is there?" he sighed.

"There's nothing, full stop," said Rune.

"It's also too dangerous an area to salvage in! The spatiotemporal distortions won't have died down yet," said Demi.

"Well, that's an honest answer. Sensors are picking up nothing," he said, "Whole ships, whole planets, just disappearing."

"You make it sound like it happens a lot around here."

"There've been incidents," said the stranger, "And this place, it's always been weird. It's only just become possible to reach it. I'm the guy that investigates weird things like this, to make sure they're not going to do the same thing to the entire galaxy. And I make a tidy profit on the side."

"For what it's worth, we believe it was caused by spatiotemporal stress involved in a botched teleportation experiment," said Wren, "The problem was exacerbated by an enemy fleet firing upon the colony. We had assumed that our own spacejump was redirected by the spatiotemporal distortion. If this isn't an isolated incident caused by a migration from outside the area, we need to know."

"Who's giving who the information here? Where did this colony migration come from? Where did you guys come from, for that matter?"

"Algol," said Rune, "Both are from Algol."

"Seriously? Algol, as in Argor? The system that just vanished one day?"

"Algol has not disappeared. It is isolated from the rest of the galaxy," said Wren, "The forces that keep it isolated most probably block all communication. The problems we currently face can make any kind of communication a potential threat. If it is from the people besieging us, they can even make information a weapon."

"Everyone knows information's a weapon," remarked the stranger, "I don't believe it. A whole solar system just turns out to still be there when we thought it had gone! It was just sitting under our noses!"

"Algol is that close?"

"I can point it out to you on the spacelanes. Of course, they say it isn't actually there any more," he said, "I had assumed that it was wiped out by... dagnabbit..."

"Is there some information you feel you should share with us?" asked Wren.

"You're the ones, aren't you? That my new contacts told me to look out for," he remarked, "Look... I can't talk about this over a secure communications channel. Would you mind talking face to face, with everything powered down? Preferably in the ship that doesn't look as though it's going to fall apart any second?"

"It's your ship that'll have a seven foot tall combat android on board it," Rune shrugged.

"I bet I could take it in a fight," the man grinned even wider, "You haven't heard of me, have you? I'm Yuri."

"Sorry, never heard of you," admitted Rune.

"You're really not from around here, then," he said, "Line up the ship, we've got a specialised boarding platform so it won't take a minute."

"Oh, you're pirates," said Rune, "Wren's weaponry can get through that ship's armour plating, you know..."

"I've got other ships. This is the smallest," replied Yuri.

"We came here to find allies, Rune," Demi reminded him, then casually opened the port doors and across the boarding platform. Yuri's ship was as cluttered and makeshift on the inside as it was on the outside. As soon as they were all inside, the entire ship was locked down, then powered down except for the bare minimum life support. The ship was impossible to intercept communications with and utterly defenceless. Even the engines wouldn't go back online in an emergency.

"Don't worry. Our enemies are going to be looking for our ship's signature. As for anyone else that might try and attack us, they'd have to use the gates to warp in. Those other ships I was talking about, they're camping the gates right now. Now, do the words 'Terra' or 'Earth' mean anything to you?"


	12. Chapter 12

"Do you mean to tell me that Earth has already begun invading worlds other than our own?" asked Wren.

"They've been controlling us since before we even developed space flight," said Yuri, before quickly placing a hand on Wren's Photon Eraser and shaking his head while pushing it away from him, "Don't worry, I don't mean that we've surrendered to them. I mean, they literally control our galaxy. They can make star lanes impassible and remove warp gates. They can even delete planets. We didn't even realise they existed until recently and I'm the only reason we have any way of reaching them."

"It sounds as though they've already managed to hack and rewrite the rules of your world," said Demi, "We are aware that they have been attempting to do so for thousands of years now, and that they almost succeeded at one point."

"I always believed that they created the entire Universe in the first place," said Yuri, "Or at least that they overwrote it and built their own from scratch, to make it more suitable for them to live in."

"That's probably what they intend to do to our solar system after their initial invasion," said Demi, "Your world seems to be much more advanced than ours, and have a longer history. We do not have such things as star lanes and interstellar trade routes. Only a very few of us can even travel between our two inhabitable planets and the handful of surviving satellites."

"Sounds like your development got knocked back a bit by forces outside your control," said Yuri, "Ain't nobody's fault. And you sound like you did a grus of a better job putting up a fight."

"The fact that our small area of space is so heavily shielded probably aided us a lot in our struggle. If we attempted to expand and colonise more of space, we would have to find a way to expand the shield."

"You might not believe it, but you're also right in the middle of our star lanes, so you would have a grus of a lot of negotiation or fighting to do," said Yuri, "It was literally as though a large swathe of the galaxy just disappeared from the map. We assumed the place had just been deleted. We had no idea you were hiding on purpose!"

"It wasn't literally our idea. Algol also has... forces that control certain things about it, that the citizens don't have any say in."

"I know. And I think I've met them," said Yuri, "Or at least, some more of them. They said the ones in charge of Algol don't really get in touch any more. They were worried it was because of trouble on their end, but they haven't found any way of intervening without breaking the barrier and making things worse."

"Are you talking about other Rykrosians?" asked Rune.

"That's what they called themselves. Le-Bert, the one in charge was called. I met him around the rings of Saturn, when I was leaving Earth. Yes, I have been to Earth. Or at least, where it was. It's not there any more. They deliberately destroyed it in order to use the force of the explosion as a power source. It isn't anything more than a stable portal for them any more. I managed to collapse the portal and stop them from reaching our galaxy for a while, but I didn't really do anything more than inconvenience them. For all I know, they can rebuild easily."

"I had heard they lost their planet," said Wren, "I didn't think they would be capable of such an act, though, or have this much power. Whenever they attacked us, they appeared human."

"It's an illusion," said Yuri, "They probably brainwashed someone else into being a public face for them, or even created a simulation of a person. Real Terrans aren't even vaguely human any more. I'm not even sure they're physical beings."

"They must have been completely consumed by the Great Light," said Wren, "They accepted too much of its power into their own civilisation until they became indistinguishable from the Light itself. It's a repeat of the Motherbrain incident on a larger scale. There's always a price to accepting forced evolution from outside."

"You'd better talk to Le-Bert about that kind of thing," he said, "I don't think I can fight something like that, even with a whole fleet of battleships. I can only lead you to it and promise not to get myself brainwashed. Le-Bert has a plan, though, and it seemed to involve people he said would be arriving from Algol."

"Rykrosians. I hadn't imagined that would be who was contacting us," said Demi, "It makes sense, now I come to think of it. Le Roof said there was an entire race of them, and that they lived all over the Universe. Only someone that powerful could even get a message through to Algol."

"A word of warning. I don't really trust those Rykrosian guys, personally," said Yuri, "I don't trust anyone in authority, mind you, but I think even less of some assholes who would use three inhabited planets who haven't even developed space flight yet as a seal to keep two convicted murderers away from each other. They even got one of the planets blown up. With people still on it."

"It's not really Le Roof's fault..." began Rune, but Yuri interrupted him.

"If a Warden gets his own prison blown up after letting his computers get hacked, it kind of is his fault. I've had bad experiences with Wardens who didn't do their jobs properly. Just don't trust him. That's all I'm saying."

"We've met good and bad Rykrosians. We've even met Rykrosians who were being possessed by other Rykrosians. We should take Yuri's advice, Rune," said Demi.

"I'm still not convinced we can trust this Yuri, but I'll let it slide, seeing as I can do more about a human than a Rykrosian," Rune glanced meaningfully up at Wren, who completely ignored the Esper, far more intent on keeping up with the conversation.

"How far away from our destination are we?" asked the large combat android.

"One of my abilities is can relocate gates to the Sol system, so we can head there as soon as I reopen communications with the rest of the fleet. I'm not going in alone, with the risk that Terran ships are mobilising again," said Yuri, "That ship of yours doesn't look like it has warp capabilities, so I wouldn't recommend trying to follow inside it. The Corsair's hangar can probably store it."

"Your ship's called the 'Corsair'? You really are pirates, aren't you?" said Rune.

"We used to be, but that was only to get by. Once you become the only thing that can stop your galaxy from being deleted, you usually get pardoned for a few missing cargo ships," said Yuri.

"Rune, Tyler was a space pirate too," Wren pointed out, "We fly around in his ship all the time."

"Ha, I bet you Algolians have done a lot worse than me to piss off the authorities, if you've survived a Terran invasion on your own!" said Yuri.

"He has a point," said Demi, "Tyler and Rolf's struggle against Motherbrain was hardly condoned by the authorities of the time. And we can't pick and choose who our allies turn out to be. This is a vast galaxy, we can hardly begin to grasp the whole picture of the political situation!"

"You're right. I guess I'm a little nervous. I don't really have a reason to trust the world outside Algol. All we've ever known of it has been attackers."

"Maybe there's something even more huge outside our own dimension, and it's not just the Terrans and the Great Light or whatever!" said Yuri, "You guys should see it as an adventure. Explore something vast and wide that nobody in your solar system has ever seen before!"

"Maybe another time. We've got to save Algol first!" said Demi.

"It's settled, then. I'll tell you everything you need to know about our political situation on the way. As much as we have time for, at least!"

* * *

Rune had not been prepared for the size of the five ships in Yuri's fleet, especially their flagship, the Corsair, an enormous battleship mostly dominated by a gigantic cannon and a portable warp drive, although it also brimmed with several laser and missile platforms and multiple auxiliary engines. Apart from the Junkyard-class cruiser they had arrived in and a second heavily customised cruiser known as the Sodality, apparently a speciality of the thriving and thoroughly lawless trade hub of the Large Magellanic Belt, the Corsair was also accompanied by a heavily armoured, excessively spiky Enemonzo-class battleship with a wild red colour scheme, a Mayr-class battleship that was segmented into three parts. The Enemonzo and Reigenlandic nations who had allowed Yuri to trade for the battleships had once been at war, before Yuri persuaded them to see the greater threat, even taking sides in the dangerous mass space battles in order to manipulate them into an eventual peaceful resolution.

"That thing must be the size of Zelan!" whispered Rune as he observed a holographic diagram of the Corsair from inside it's extensive conference room.

"I doubt it, although it would compare in size to the Noah, and would be capable of inflicting considerable damage to Zelan if it chose to," said Wren.

"That there is a high stream antimatter cannon. The lasers and missiles can do more damage between them with a barrage and don't take as long to charge up again, but that baby has a range advantage on damn near everything," explained Gadina, a burly mercenary woman with a permanent leer caused by heavy facial scarring, who served as chief gunnery officer on board the Corsair. She seemed to have taken a liking to Wren, who was quite content to listen to her obsess over the weapons systems, and who didn't even need to move for hours on end.

Demi had earlier been snatched away by the science officers, an elderly man with a receding hairline who wore a rather battered labcoat and had an unsettling gleam in his eye, and his two assistants, both serious-looking middle-aged women, one of whom had bright purple hair and kept demanding to know everything there was to know about Laconia, the other of whom had to forcibly restrain her boss from trying to dismantle Demi. Rune himself had met the chief medical officers, a father and daughter who had joined them after leaving some sort of international relief organisation which they worried was becoming corrupted. The daughter had insisted on giving him a check-up and a long lecture about eating a healthy diet. He had also met the chief security officers and heads of the expedition teams, both of whom had been explorers, traders and industrialists before joining Yuri's crew and had plenty of tales to tell him. Rune had expected all of Yuri's crew to be seedy undesirables but there seemed to be a wide variety of people, as well as far more people than he had imagined would be needed in a pirate crew. He hadn't banked on their ships being so large, either. He couldn't see how they would be able to sneak around the star lanes unnoticed, until he remembered that the galaxy outside Algol was an unimaginably huge place, and that Yuri was involved in a lot more than pirating these days. It was more like travelling with a larger scale version of the Protectors, a team of adventurers and explorers who all shared the goal of countering a threat to their world but had very little else in common.

Yuri's beloved, Kira, was the person with the most interesting story to tell, although Yuri had warned Rune not to try and pressure her into describing it in detail if it was traumatising her. She had actually been erased from reality by the invading forces of Earth, to such an extent that the rest of the crew had forgotten she ever existed. It had only been because of Yuri's link to her and his ability to counteract their reality-warping and mind-warping powers, that he had managed to restore her into existence by sheer force of will, in the same way that he made gates to the Sol system appear. Yuri admitted that his ability to resist the Terrans came from a certain connection to them, that his physical existence had been directly constructed by them for their own purposes, rather than him being a native object of the galaxy. This potentially made him easy to observe, even though he could actually fight harder against possession due to the limited autonomy built into him to make him more suited to his role.

"With that in mind, it's your decision whether to trust me or not," Yuri had said to him on the bridge, two hours before they were due to set off through the newly constructed warp gate. He had left Wren and Gadina still discussing the merits and flaws of different types of giant space battleships, in the wild hope that Wren just might decide not to build his own once they got back to Algol, or even worse, suggest the idea to Demi.

"You can bring things back to the way they were before," replied Rune, "Do you think you would ever be able to use that power to restore everything that's been lost on Algol? To give people like Doran a normal life? Maybe even to bring Palma back?"

"I can only bring things back that I already know about, and that I can feel so strongly about that I really would do anything to bring them back," said Yuri, "So, you'd be best off doing that yourself. I'm sorry."

"I don't think I can do that sort of thing."

"Well, someone in Algol can. Le Bert said so," Yuri told him, "There are people like me, who are immune to all the changes that have forced upon the Universe by irresponsible creators, just because we're too damn stubborn to go along with the changes and accept the new reality, we keep accidentally making big changes of our own that shouldn't be possible."

"I think I know what you're talking about," said Rune, "People like Rolf... the Rogues... the crazy mining guy on Dezolis... maybe even Doran."

"See? I think it might be this Doran who ends up saving you."

"That's... not something I'm looking forward to. You haven't seen how she tries to 'save' people..."

Just then, Demi walked onto the bridge, sighing forlornly in a way that expressed more emotion than Rune had thought her programming to be capable of.

"Professor Muzeni can't program me with psychic capabilities," she told Rune, "I am returning to the engineering bay to power down for an hour or so. Please make sure you are refreshed in time for the journey, too!"


	13. Chapter 13

Encircled by Her entourage, the Corsair began to move towards the warp gate. Raw blue bolts of energy crackled around the battleship, giving it the appearance that it was disintegrating for a moment, then it reappeared in a very different-looking sky. Apart from the giant sphere of nothingness on the edge of it, the system just outside Algol had been a fairly typical region of outlying space, with a few sparsely colonised planets, a lonely space station, a few fiercely burning nebulae and several clusters of asteroids, some of which were populated with mining colonies in varying states of success, at least one of which was a front for a pirate cartel. The Sol system was dead. It hadn't been populated by anything recognisable as life for millennia and it seemed as though it was going into early entropy death, the light of its stars red and wan, its remaining planetary bodies greying husks. The blackness of space seemed thinned, more like a screen of a machine turned off than a screen with no data entered onto it but the underlying systems of the Universe still humming away. The absence of any telemental energy, even in its most primordial form, screamed at Rune louder than any amount of presence. The aftermath of the Great Light, the way it caused sudden, rapid, senseless 'upgrading' until the original was burnt out, could clearly be seen. This system clearly had a long history but nothing remained to mark it.

A report came in from the sensor room that a greater transfer of energy than normal was taking place near the Sol gate, and although no Phages (the bizarre biomechanical Terran ships that seemed more to be made up of random clumps of matter with no thought to their design, other than giving them the capacity to disintegrate as much non-Phage matter as physically possible while withstanding any return fire) were yet present, the ability to start warping them in again was likely to return at short notice. Saturn was closer to the Corsair's warp gate than Terra and in the opposite direction, so the first stage at least would be safe. The ringed gas giant, several hundred times the size of Motavia, somehow grated less against Rune's senses. He could feel that there was at least something there, intact, unchanged, although it couldn't possibly be anything like a human mind. Living with only Rykrosians for company, followed by only androids, for months on end, his sanity accepted surprisingly well that something worth talking to could live here. As it was magnified on the observation panel in the conference room, Rune saw that the rings contained not only fragments of rock and ice but also a small artificial structure that reminded him of the Floating Castle. Yuri explained that they would be docking there.

"It looks like a suicidal landing but we'll be guided in by our host as soon as we approach the rings. There's some sort of force field around the Temple that protects it from any wear and tear. It extends quite a way out," he assured them.

As they flew closer to the rings, Rune saw that the structure was similar in design to the Silence Temple, only larger, the size of the original Gumbious Temple when it was a grand Cathedral. He assumed this was to compensate for the fact that the Rykrosian only had an asteroid to place their only means of communication with this dimension on top of. (Rune briefly wondered: Were they called Rykrosians if they didn't live on Rykros? He wasn't sure if the planet Rykros was considered a homeland, or even an important landmark, to such a far-reaching race that technically didn't need to live on planets at all.) It was also made of a more modest translucent crystal with veins of milky white. Rune sat on the comfortable leather executive chair and closed his eyes in meditation, letting his mind drift free of the tangled web of worries about his homeland, the cacophony of new information still being stored away in relevant categories of his memory and the feelings of revulsion, of being mentally drained just trying to exist in this tainted place. He directed his astral self towards the Temple, trying to brush against the mind of the entity waiting there, an initial greeting that showed willingness to make his presence known.

"I am Rune Walsh," he told the entity, "Descendant of Lutz, Wizard of Algol."

"I know who you are," came the reply, with a mental force that immediately enveloped him, filling his entire mind with its presence. Its size as a psychic object easily equalled Le Roof's but Rune didn't have the same familiarity over time that he did with the chronicler of Rykros to make His size easier to cope with. In the darkness of Rune's meditative void, he saw the entity known as Le-Bert in the form that He imagined Himself as: the rings of Saturn themselves, a world-cycle made of debris, a last stronghold in a fallen outpost.

"I felt your presence ever since you left Algol, and even further back, I knew that someone had picked up my messages, and that they were attempting to leave. I apologise for not being particularly helpful. I am too far away and I have duties of my own here in Sol."

"You're fighting the Great Light?"

"Holding Him back," said the Rykrosian, "Thwarting His attempts to create a physical form in this dimension. This is difficult when He already controls the local reality system. It is only the initial wards we put in place that makes it still possible."

"What do you need us to do?" asked Rune, "Why did you call us here? We'll do all we can to help..."

"I commend you for your mental prowess and I accept that you are the ones I have been waiting for, but I would rather speak with all of you at once. There is something I need to see that resides on your physical body."

Rune felt the presence disconnect its mental link to his own consciousness, then spent a few minutes clearing his head until Demi shook him awake. They were about to dock in a space port similar to the one outside the Silence Temple but also much larger. Rune suddenly realised that the entire structure would need to be larger just to include a hangar that would accommodate the Corsair, something that, annoyingly for Yuri, most commercial space ports didn't have. The escort fleet remained in orbit, ready to intercept any attacks on the satellite or their docked flagship. They emerged from the docking bay doors into the central chamber of the Temple, with its familiar crystalline mosaic floor pattern and glowing red centre stone. Stepping into the centre of the pattern, they were engulfed by the same darkness and saw the pattern that Rune had seen earlier in his brief vision.

Another light caught his attention: the Elsydeon had flared up brightly, intangible blue fire flowing down its blade. He held it out for Wren and Demi to inspect. Yuri had been interested in the sword earlier, comparing it to a rare weapon called a Plasmic Blade that was often given to individuals such as Yuri who were created as tools for the Terrans. Demi had theorised that swords, for some reason, made good information storage media for incorporeal beings.

"Yes, that's what I need to complete my mission," said Le-Bert as soon as Rune produced the Elsydeon.

"It's not really supposed to leave Algol," Rune said nervously, remembering Yuri's warning.

"And yet you somehow thought to take it with you."

"For my own protection."

"Because it contains the core settings of Algol itself, information essential to the very existence of Algol. If anything should be able to restore you from corruption, that sword would. Of course, if left in the hands of someone who didn't know how to use it, who didn't know how to stop it being corrupted itself..."

"I've used it to restore Le Roof once before. I know how it works," It was half true. Rune had performed the task under Le Roof's instruction, and he had been a rather clumsy and stupid apprentice. He had no idea how it worked, only that it did. He hadn't even thought of using it as a mechanical means of protecting himself from corruption. He had been hoping that the spirits inside it could help him.

"Then you can use it to restore information about Algol to another terminal. A higher authority terminal, one that accesses the control system for the entire galaxy. Its name is Oneiros. It's currently in enemy hands but Yuri can hack it to accept the Elsydeon. You will be necessary to actually activate the Elsydeon: it only accepts input from an entity originating from Algol with no history of data integrity loss. Those prison systems are paranoid. As for the actual forces attacking you, you've been assigned a fleet that has already destroyed a Phage invasion fleet in battle."

"Are you saying you want me to invade the Great Light's version of this place?"

"Precisely," replied Le-Bert, causing Rune to begin sweating. A conflict raged in his mind between his innate stubbornness and paranoia on one side, telling him that he must never admit that he had no idea what he was talking about, and his growing concern for the success of the mission on the other.

"Won't the Great Light just change the data back? He might even manage to counter-hack the Elsydeon!" said Demi.

"You forget that the Great Light is a convict - an exile. He doesn't really have the authority to use that terminal. He stole it from my colleague. Your use of the terminal will be official and, because of this, immediately recognised by our Central Command as a valid input, and reinforced through their own link to the system as soon as it is re-established."

"Why doesn't your Central Command just send their own people here?" asked Rune, "Aren't there millions of you?"

"Apart from the fact that very few of us can actually materialise in physical form at once without tearing space and time apart, we were taken by surprise when the Sol system was hacked. Sol was always a frontier system and very difficult to communicate with at short notice. The Great Light blocked communications as soon as he took over. There were plenty of guards posted here – I'm the only surviving guard – but he overpowered them at a rate we didn't expect."

"Your intelligence sucks," said Yuri.

"Please take into account that the Great Light and the Profound Darkness are the only recorded cases of one Rykrosian managing to permanently destroy another Rykrosian's true form," said Le-Bert, "They are barely even the same species as ourselves any more. Le Roof probably has more information on them than the rest of us combined. I wouldn't be surprised if the Elsydeon hasn't been programmed with a few tricks to evade their corruption attempts that are specific to those two."

"It has been used directly as an extremely effective weapon against the Profound Darkness," confirmed Wren.

"When... if I use the Elsydeon in that thing... what will actually happen?" asked Rune.

"The original form of Algol will be restored and then locked against further hacking attempts. Both sides of the prison will be reinforced again, corruption caused by the breakout will be removed from the entire galaxy and the infected systems restored. Once Central Command realises what has happened, I'm sure they'll listen to Le Roof's stern words about not leaving two intergalactic terrorists in a prison with such flimsy security."

"You're sure, huh? They sound pretty incompetent," said Yuri, folding his arms, "A bit like our bureaucrats."

"I kinda have to agree with him. How do you think the people of Algol feel about their solar system being used as a prison? And don't just tell me that we're not supposed to notice as long as it all works fine. That's what Motherbrain used to say to people!"

"How do you know about that, Rune?" asked Wren, causing the Esper to unleash a string of expletives, "I share my companion's worried, although I am more worried about an alternative scenario: that your superiors do recognise the need for change within Algol, and that the changes they implement are as damaging to our identity as the changes forced upon us by the Great Light."

"You can't have it both ways. Algol's been a seal for five thousand years. All intelligent life on Algol's planets evolved with it being a seal. It probably affected their history a lot," Le-Bert pointed out, "We can put it back to how it was before the Light and the Darkness broke out and put ten times the shields around those seals, place guards in every system across the whole galaxy. Even that might change things a lot, though. How much of your history is already about your heroes valiantly fighting against the Darkness?"

"You have a point," said Rune.

"And even if we just left history as it was up until now, with everyone's memories intact, your civilisation is bound to reach space eventually. There won't be a reason to keep people here, not without it just being a prison for them as well. Some idiots might even try to go off and slay the Light, or find a way to slay the Darkness permanently, and open the seals by themselves. That's what mortals do."

"They'll have the free will to do so, though," said Yuri, "And you can help them, if it comes to it. Show them how the equipment works, like you did with us. It'll be quicker and easier than leaving them to find out for themselves and running the risk of them being corrupted by the first enemy that comes their way."

"I agree," said Demi, "I also believe that a complete memory restoration, but without the actual corruption of the data relating to Algol's history or the compulsions to leave Algol unnecessarily in a forced societal evolution, would resolve the problem better than trying to cover up the facts."

"It would still change a lot of things."

"Algol has seen a lot of change over the millennia, and retained its core identity. Even now, the ones who remain here, even the people on the Colony, know who they are," replied Demi, "It is only because of this repeated pressure on us, with no instructions on how to mend the cracks, combined with the sudden intense increase in pressure, that has led to our identity being threatened."

"And it's our fault. Yes, I know. It isn't really an excuse, but I really am just a guard. I don't make the decisions. I just hold this gate."

"Then we want you to contact your superiors and I want them to agree with the decision in front of us before we agree to anything. Algol has known only conflict and will probably choose to retain its identity at all costs – this is a decision I will agree with – but we must be given the choice to make either decision, the resources to do so and the weapons to fight outside resistance from third parties."

"You do realise that it would take several years to relay the message, don't you? I thought your solar system was under attack."

"Oh, we are still going to use the Elsydeon to restore Algol. We're just not going to give the exact command you want us to. We can get a signal to Le Roof through this, yes? I can warn him to shut the gates against you. You already admitted those shields can be made stronger. Think how much longer Le Roof has been trapped in there with everything going wrong. If you are growing jaded, think how He must feel. Once you have agreed to our terms and conditions and Le Roof is reassured that you will not outright repossess and maliciously modify our solar system, you will be allowed full access to Algol."

"You're talking about open insubordination. A prison mutiny. It'll be treated as a hostage situation!"

"It should not escalate that fair. It has already been demonstrated how dangerous an effect any sort of violence can have on Algol's seals. If anything, we would be doing you a favour by strengthening the shields on this very dangerous prison to a level that even the highest ranking officials require authorisation to enter."

"And what if we believe the Warden's integrity is compromised?"

"Even after a complete virus sweep that wasn't authorised by Him? This will be a secondary measure. After the initial isolation. Records of which will also be sent back to them."

"I was warned the people inside Algol would be a little difficult after everything that's happened to them," Le Bert sighed, "I want to see the two of them isolated and the corruption removed. Once I know that you upheld your part of the deal, I won't resist once I see the shields get stronger, and then I'll send the message."

"I believe this arrangement is in both our best interests."

"I can't absolutely guarantee that they won't just come and do their own thing anyway, you know. You'll need very strong shields to hold off all of them."

"We will be ready for them," said Demi. Then she casually cut off communication. Wren gave her an admiring look.

"I did not know you were programmed for negotiation," he told her.

"Rykrosians are not as stubborn as Motavians," she remarked, "We should return to the Corsair now."


	14. Chapter 14

By the time the Corsair had rejoined the rest of the fleet, the scanners had begun to pick up the first Phage signatures. A Madre Phage was orbiting Earth, almost obscured by the cloud of Bug-classification biomechanical drones that protected it while it generated the army of Phages to seek out and destroy the intruders to the dead solar system that was the Terran main point of entry into the physical dimensions. By now, Yuri's fleet had probably been recorded and specially noted as a primary threat, to be prioritised above all other targets.

"They didn't come through a gate," said Kira, "Their gate would have been a huge beacon, and I'm not picking up anything of the sort in the system, apart from the residual traces of our own. From the looks of it, the Phages were already lying dormant there until we activated them."

"Le Bert said that the Oneiros was somewhere around Earth. Perhaps they are a standing security force," said Wren, "From what you have described of Phages, they would not need to be permanently activated in order to be stored somewhere. They must have been activated when we began scanning the wreckage of Earth for electronic activity."

"They could easily have been spying on us the whole time," said Yuri, "Well, as long as they're not gating in any more, we can take them!"

"Be careful, Yuri, that's still a big swarm out there!" warned Kira.

"Our mission takes priority. We should only engage as much as necessary to reach the destination point," said Wren, "Keep the scanners running. We need to pinpoint the exact location as soon as possible. Demi, engage anti-hacking system."

"Our computers are already protected against them," said Kira, "How do you think we've fought them before and survived?"

"It isn't only the Terrans that will be attacking us," said Wren, just as 'Death Place' began playing at full volume over the communications system, "That Phage is in range of the main cannon, by the way."

The first shot was fired, a dark, crackling bolt of pure antimatter that tore through the very event field of the space it travelled through, leaving the same emptiness, reflecting only the black void around it, as the paradox explosion, except that it made a lot less difference to the environment here. Still, the Corsair avoided travelling the path of its own cannon until space-time resolved itself again. The target was utterly annihilated. Fundamentally incapable of having their morale broken, the rest of the Phages immediately converged upon the attacking fleet like a swarm of locusts, their lighter antimatter weapons a stream of pure, indiscriminate destruction, their very purpose to remove offending sections of the Universe wholesale. Wren saw his enemy on the viewing screens for the first time outside recordings and simulations. Their appearance made no pretence at trying to emulate anything already existing in the Universe. Black, spiky balls of raw matter that fired their deadly weapons from the many ridges in-between their spines, they reminded Wren more of murderous pine cones than anything else. Any intended humour was lost on him as a well-aimed shot thudded straight through the Mayr's shields and took out its primary missile launcher just as it was about to launch a deadly volley at the nearest Phage cluster. Gadina's delightful voice began a steady stream of epithets over the intercom, trying to match the rhythm of the song that was still playing. The Sodality wheeled around the support the Mayr, adding its own firepower to keep the advancing Phages at bay. Their formation surrounded the Corsair while leaving enough room for it to fire the cannon a second time. Meanwhile, Demi and Kira watched the scanners. An electronic signature finally showed up on the radar. It was Demi's makeshift anti-Great Light possession device that disrupted the cloaking field around their destination. Rather than an electronic device, it worked more like a very powerful technique, a rewrite of the local quantum field itself so that the information could not have an observer. In creating a bubble that protected the integrity of Algol's reality, as a place where objects could, as a rule, be perceived by self-aware consciousnesses, the effect was momentarily disrupted. That was when they saw it: a second Noah spaceship. The system had not only been hacked, it had been moved, possibly even integrated into another system so that it could be more efficiently controlled.

As Demi relayed the co-ordinates to the navigation bridge, she pondered the possibility that Oneiros had already been corrupted to the extent that it believed the Great Light to be its true operator and would no longer respond to commands from outside. If that was the case, the plan would no longer work and the only thing that could be accomplished was shutting down the system so that the Great Light could no longer use it. However, if it was disconnected from the wider network in such a manner, the Great Light would not be able to use Oneiros to spread its own influence, a goal that the Light seemed to be strongly prioritising. For that reason alone, such a system might at least be kept in communication with other systems until they could be brought under the Light's control. Demi hoped that was the case but prepared for either eventuality as she uploaded the most immediately useful scripts into her routines as a control android. There was no use in assuming either to be the case before the truth could be confirmed.

Alarms began to blare as the room shuddered. The Corsair had been hit by a Madre Phage's antimatter blasters but its shields were still holding. The Mayr was forced to retreat, causing the Corsair to come under fire from a direction it couldn't fire its main cannon. The rest of the weapons were readjusting to focus on the defensive weaknesses but it was taking too long for comfort. It was even more imperative that they reach their destination soon. Demi began charging her Photon Eraser and walked briskly down to the shuttle bay, where Wren and Rune were waiting for her. An extremely flustered Yuri was visible on the intercom, still yelling orders to every sector of the ship while he ran down the corridor from the bridge.

"We have a problem," said Wren, "The Corsair has nowhere to dock. The ship resembling the Noah will mostly likely fire upon us, at any rate, and the Corsair cannot afford to take any more damage. The concentration of firepower is currently too heavy for a shuttle to break through."

"Then how do you suggest we reach our mission site?" asked Demi.

Wren looked pointedly at Rune, who returned him a look as though he had just suggested firing himself out of the missile launcher at the enemy ship.

"I told you, this is a really bad idea! Do you remember what happened the last two times we did this?"

"Indeed. We survived both relatively unscathed."

"And each time, it was pretty clear what would happen if we tried it one too many times! Look what happened to the Colony, Wren. That could be us!"

"It would solve one of the problems," mused Wren.

"Are you suggesting that Rune teleport us in?" asked Demi.

"Back me up on this!" cried Rune, "You agree with me that it's a really stupid idea, right?"

"Actually, under certain circumstances, there is a way it could be performed and even give us a head start," said Demi, "But it would require both Rune and myself to devote all of our resources. Wren, we will probably meet heavy resistance on the other side and we will be helpless to defend ourself. You will be the only thing keeping us alive."

"What do you plan to do?" he asked.

"We are going to activate the Elsydeon early," she explained, "Rune and I shall both connect our consciousness to the sword. I shall use its function as a control key to begin remotely hacking the device over the sensors. Then Rune will begin the teleportation while using the Elsydeon's powers to protect us, as it did when we were leaving the Edge after defeating the Profound Darkness."

"This plan has so many things wrong with it! We don't even know if that's definitely how the Elsydeon works!"

"However, I have definitely observed that the Elsydeon has been protecting us throughout the entire journey so far," said Demi. Rune looked down at the sword. It was already emitting a faint glow, pulsing in time to the song. As he tightened his grip on the hilt and tuned in his mind, Rune heard several voices singing along in harmony. The spirits of Algol were awake and restless.

"Someone tell Yuri to get a move on," he ordered, then walked with Demi back to the sensor room.


	15. Chapter 15

More voices added depth and volume to the choir of souls as Rune delved deeper into his trance. The song had changed from one of battle to a song of remembrance and a hymn to the stars: a song called 'Never Dream'. The tune itself was simple but powerful, an endless reaffirmation of the Cycle of Fate, but every harmony was as different as the personality of the singer. Rune began to pick out different voices and match them to the shape of their spirit bodies: Rune's own voice deep and choir-trained from the group ritual meditation that the Espers were taught in the central hall, Lutz's surprisingly high and melodic, Alis' untrained but powerful, the words alive with personal meaning. Alys was never a particularly good singer and neither, apparently, were Nei or Rolf, although Rhys had a hidden talent. Rune briefly realised that he had no idea who Rhys was, then he remembered the face as being one of those from the abandoned Colony, the newly reunited lost souls. The souls of the wizards Rune and Lutz were great, bright flames soaring and twirling, their flickering forks sometimes brushing against each other and merging at the ends. The warriors' souls were smaller and more focussed but just as bright. Alis' was a fierce cyclone. The androids' spirits were visible too, clusters of overlapping geometric shapes that rarely moved, Demi's pulsing noticeably brighter than Wren's. Demi was playing a recording of the song over her speakers as she focused on the hacking job but Wren was actually trying his best to sing along in his atonal voice. Myau's yowling was conspicuous by his continued absence, presumably still aiding his fellow Musk Cats in battle against the manifestation of the Great Light. Worryingly, Doran was also nowhere to be seen. Rune seemed to remember that she loved singing, and in particular was fond of this song. He tried once more to tell himself that he didn't remember any such thing, that he wasn't Lutz, but in this place it didn't matter, he was Rune, he was Lutz, he was Motavia, he was Algol, he was the cycle of fate and the song itself.

"Now!" yelled the conglomeration of small squares that was currently Demi's spiritual avatar, as the fire-tipped squares flipped over and over, faster and faster until some were hurled out before new flames budded and changed shape to replace them. Rune understood somehow that this was how it looked from the spirit realm when Demi linked to another system. With a brief telepathic message of 'farewell and somebody watch out for Doran', Rune conjured a mental image of the place he wished to teleport to. He hadn't been to this place but he still had Lutz's memories of the bridge of the Noah. He could only hope that the interior of the ship in orbit around Neptune was as identical to the Noah as the exterior.

He released his will and, with a nauseating lurch, fell through a tunnel of pure psychic energy. When he opened his eyes, Wren had already activated his Positron Bolt unit and was unloading an entire photon cell at something very large that loomed above him.

"Teleport successful. Only minimal interference detected," reported Demi.

Wren did not answer. Another squadron of Warren-class security androids were pouring through the hole where Wren's Positron Bolt had destroyed the far wall, so Wren was trying to get his Burst Rocket unit to activate at the right time to hit them all while they were still scrambling through the hole. A second Aerotank appeared from around the corner, briefly glanced at the flaming wreckage of the first and sprayed the bridge with laser fire. Wren sprang out of the way and almost tripped over one of the Whistle-class scout robots hovered around the room at random, their sirens blaring.

"The device is this way," Demi pointed to a small side door leading off from the bridge, near the security officer's chair, inconspicuous amongst the grandeur and current pandemonium of the room. Up until now, everything had looked identical to the Noah. Lutz's memories were screaming at him that this room hadn't been on that ship and his instincts were screaming back that there shouldn't be any such rooms on its counterpart either. A sign on the door proclaimed 'Restricted Access - Authorised Personnel Only'. Firmly locked, a voice recognition panel and retinal scanner were necessary to access the door. Wren casually kicked it open for her before throwing himself at the Spectre-class robot that materialised from underneath a cloaking device and tried to follow Demi through the door. At her request, Rune followed her and threw a Nafoi technique at the Podhead unit inside the surprisingly spacious room, just as it was about to throw a bolt of electricity at them from its front panel.

"Don't damage its internal workings!" Demi chided him. Walking over to the Podhead unit, she tore free its carapace, now a mess of burned-out wires, warped armour plating and melted glass panels, then threw it to the floor with a resounding clang. Rune's eyes followed the command pod's ruined shell as it rolled across the floor. That was when he noticed the pattern on the floor. It was another Rykrosian tile mosaic, identical to the inner sanctums of Le Roof and Le Bert's temples. The thick black cables leading in all directions from the Podhead, across the floor, up the walls, even dangling from the ceiling, had been pinned into ridges carved down the lines of the mosaics.

"They have been attempting to force the unit's activation by jump-starting the summoning chamber," explained Demi, "Oneiros must have refused to speak to them. It's a much more powerful system than the ones assigned to Le Roof and Le Bert!"

"Never dream," whispered Rune. He could still hear their voices inside his head as he held the Elsydeon in his outstretched hand. The blade hummed its own tune of raw power as he walked over to the centre of the pattern with its tip pointed to the place where the crystal should be, somewhere underneath the Podhead's command chair and endless wires.

"What the hell are you doing?" demanded the Esper as Demi hauled herself into the seat and began plugging the jacks on the ends of the wires, one by one, into the corresponding units in the back and sides of her head, her shoulders and down her arms, "That's dangerous! You don't know where that thing's been! Just rip it out and talk to the Rykrosian normally!"

"It would damage the mechanism. The Podhead is embedded directly into the central activation crystal. Try to relax," she said, closing her eyes and fixing him that calm, administrative smile of hers, the one that came across her face whenever she saw her favourite Landrover or the control terminal of her own system, Nurvus, after a long period away from home, "I already have this under control... you must wait until the correct time to perform your role in this... Rune? Rune, I am detecting sudden teleport fluctuations... please confirm your whereabouts... Rune? Answer me, Rune!"

She was about to open her eyes and attempt an emergency pull-out of her consciousness but the effect had already taken hold, transporting both observers to the proxy dimension, and, a split second beforehand, she had already seen that Rune wasn't there any more.


	16. Chapter 16

Rune already knew his Ryuka technique had gone wrong in some way. He had experienced enough of it by now to recognise the signs almost as soon as they happened. Especially the headache, the dizziness, exhaustion and even more profound nausea than just a regular, successful teleport with a little dimensional turbulence due to unclear stipulations. He was ready for it this time. He took the trimate out of his robe pockets and downed it in one. The thick, syrupy fog that the strong medicine tended to create within his brain was at least more welcome than the torture of the after-effects of a botched teleport.

He still had a body. A tangible one that hadn't been reduced to component parts which were then scattered randomly across space, time and probability. He was still conscious and almost definitely alive. That was a welcome start. Looking around him, he hadn't even been bounced somewhere too hellish. Or, at the very least, it wasn't Skure again, which was all that mattered. In fact, if he hadn't been dragged away from the crucial point in a mission to save an entire galaxy, he would have found the scenery rather relaxing.

That, and if something imperceptible, some instinct so deep and fundamental to his very existence that it went beyond even his training as Lutz, wasn't screaming at him to get as far away from this utterly deceptive, revolting, loathsome place as he possibly could, as fast as possible.

Superficially, it looked like a pleasant, grassy meadow. A pair of golden-winged butterflies hovered above a bed of fragile white flowers. In the middle of the hill was a marble bench. The only sounds were the trills of birds and the sigh of a gentle summer breeze. The sun was marred only by a small tuft of cloud appearing overhead. To Rune, it was a perfect depiction of peace, of the end to conflict, everything he was fighting for and hoping to return to. It was the clearing on the hill in Termi, where the statue of Alis was finally at rest. It was the bank where Chaz and Rika sat and watched the sun go down every night in Aiedo's town square, after they had defeated the Profound Darkness. It was the fields of Torinco after the Rappy infestation had left.

For one small moment, Rune had the passing notion that his quest was finally over, that Demi had managed to succeed without him after all, that he could just lay down on the bench and go to sleep. It was all complete. He never needed to fight any more. Then he remembered that Chaz and Rika had been flooded with commissions as the Guild's new most popular Hunters, mundane, absolutely un-Profound-Darkness-related crises for them to somehow sort out. He remembered that the Rappies were in another field somewhere, probably breeding a lot more Rappies and an even stronger generation of King Rappy. He remembered that Alis' soul was battling the darkness once again, fighting back with her sheer strength of will, the very same kind that he was manifestly not demonstrating by such thoughts of giving up the fight; the same will that inhabited the sword he held in his grasp, that he was supposed to be using as a control key for the Oneiros.

The cloud drifted directly overhead and grew, blotting out the sun, until he saw the realm for what it was. Time stopped still, the calling of the birds frozen on the same note as though it were a crashed simulation, then everything went grey and began to crumble to dust. Rune could hear other frozen echoes of the world, too, the wind, his footsteps and the hum of the ground, the beat of the tortured planet, and it sounded like the endless tortured wails of souls in Hell. Through the cracks in the world, congealed, pale light began to ooze. Rune drew the Elsydeon and began incanting a Deban technique, circling around to keep both the snaking tentacles of light and the flitting grey shadows in his field of view.

The tendrils coiled around the bench, then intertwined with each other to create the image of a tall, graceful woman with long flowing hair, a mature figure that wasn't covered by any clothing and an impassive expression on her full lips. To Rune, she mostly just looked like Motherbrain. As he thought of the dictatorial supercomputer's avatar, his perception of her merged to match it. She looked a little confused at this, then changed the stars that swirled inside her womb to look, not like Algol, but an entire galaxy.

"Why did you ruin it," she whispered in a calm female voice that had the air of a salesman practices in persuading people to buy faulty goods, "You do know that you ruined it, don't you? That you caused this mess. You thought it up. I was trying to show you what you were after, your true peace of mind, but you trust people so little, you even turn your greatest dreams into waking nightmares."

"Oh, come off it, anyone can tell that wasn't real," said Rune, swiping away a shade that flew too close, "And I remember perfectly well who I'm up against, thank you!"

"Has it ever occurred to you that I might genuinely want to give people what they're after? That the reason I change things is because they're not right? That people don't actually want them like that except you?"

"Oh yeah, the Sol System looked like it satisfied everyone's requirements!"

"My creations require a lot of power. They're much more sophisticated and run on the newest technology. They even exist in more perceptual dimensions! But power has to come from somewhere. To build new things, you have to tear down obsolete, unnecessary things."

"Who the hell are you to say what's..."

"And you'll notice I evacuated all the people first. Look, here is where I was going to house all your people!"

The ground began to rumble underneath Rune. He tried to maintain his hold on reality but the floor suddenly giving way underneath him distracted him. He fell onto a metal surface, the floor of a walkway in a large, busy space port's main plaza. The metal gleamed, newly built, and the store in front of him with the automatic glass door also said 'Now Open!'. On the other side of the shop front, he saw that it was filled with people of all ages and appearances, chatting excitedly as they browsed the aisles. Their clothes resembled those of the Earthmen but civilian versions, in every outlandish colour and design. There were a few outfits designed for personal security, maybe something a rookie Hunter would wear, but the actual port security seemed to be managed by androids: humanoid androids like Wren, with almost as much variety of appearance as humans. The people also milled around the main plaza, waiting to go up or down the escalators, staring up at the main board that was displaying maps of the entire port or sometimes broadcasting the latest news. There was some kind of medical facility, what looked like a tiny version of the Hunter's Guild reception and a door that was heavily guarded and said 'Off Limits to All Unauthorised Personnel'. Rune had an immediate urge to go through it.

"Feel free to enter that area," she told him, "You will not be stopped. The place was designed for you. It is a dangerous place, the unknown, a frontier. That is what you want to preserve, isn't it? The adventures. The legends. But people want to make their own now. The pioneers who left Palma, rather than staying on an already dead planet..."

"Yeah, I know what you did to them," said Rune. Glancing over his shoulder, he squinted hard at the main screen and willed it to display a giant image of Motherbrain, to portray exactly what he thought of the place.

"An excellent idea. I agree that we need something to immortalise the past, for nostalgia's sake. The Terrans were never going to abandon the past altogether, you know, just stop forcing people to live in it. That's all your own plan amounts to. It's as artificial a world as this space station. If you really want Algol to thrive, it's going to change beyond recognition over the millennia. Hasn't it already done so, in lots of ways?" Her voice was coming from the face on the screen as well as the image in front of him, now.

"You don't understand how a living Universe works. History is a cycle. The same legends will always return," said Rune, "But not to this place. This place is broken. You've just made a few token gestures to compensate people for breaking their stuff."

"Things that are still under construction often look broken. This is a blank slate, a place for me to create a new world, and look at how much progress I am making already!"

"Is this why you brought me here when I was really quite busy? To show off?" Rune wished he felt the bravado he was showing. He wished he could feel anything, even an appropriate level of terror at being in the middle of a world completely controlled by his worst enemy, or panic at the looming deadline, but he was mostly just exhausted and frustrated at nothing ever going right.

"You were the one who brought yourself here. Or was it an accident? You do have a lot of teleport accidents, don't you. How long do you think you can hold out? Are you sure you even exist in your own dimension any more? You might not be able to leave without completely destroying yourself. You should at least try and make a home for yourself, just in case."

"This is a different dimension?"

"Of course. I don't have any access rights to your dimension and besides, there's already so much already built, all I would really be doing is adding my own touches. I can start again from scratch here."

"You mean we're in the actual dimension you were banished to?"

"It was so lonely here before I persuaded things to come and exist here. I even showed them how. Of course, it took them a lot of resources, but it doesn't matter. Here, they can build anew! I won't put any restrictions on them! They can even choose their own destinies instead of being tied to fate!"

"That's what this is about, isn't it? You don't even care about the Profound Darkness or Algol. You just want your exile to be more comfortable!"

"An exile has the right to start afresh and build their own nation."

"Not by stealing entire solar systems from the place that banished you!" he yelled, "How am I even surviving here? How is any of this surviving here?"

"As I said, are you sure you exist in your own dimension any more? Teleportation accidents can convert matter into different forms entirely, if it disassembles them at a fundamental enough level."

"You've been deliberately creating teleport accidents, haven't you?"

"They're not accidents if they're deliberate. The Terrans have created an entire civilisation around the process of transplanting themselves to a higher dimension by warping space-time. You shouldn't criticise my methodology. I'm not actually harming anyone, and it was your people who taught me how it worked."

"What do you mean, my people? Do you mean the accident on the Colony?"

"When that accident first happened, the victims were sent somewhere that brushed against my dimension. I couldn't persuade them to volunteer for my own experiments but I used the information I had gleaned from observing their existence as a model for this world."

"And you thought that was how Algolians were supposed to live?"

"It at least contained the basics necessary for such an entity to exist. It also told me of the existence of Algol and its rough co-ordinates."

"So you used that information to invade."

"Advertise for more volunteers. Or, if I discovered that the inhabitants of the system were fundamentally incapable of inclusion in the project, to allow the Terrans to use it for their much needed resources."

"In other words, you dispose of anyone who doesn't fall for your deception," said Rune, "Did you even notice that Algol was the seal on your prison? Or are you just planning to absorb the entire Universe into your plan, regardless of the detail?"

"None of it seems to be being used for anything important, said the voice, And as I said, nothing will be lost. I am offering everyone in this Universe the chance to ascend to a higher plane and obtain freedom."

"I never realised 'freedom' meant 'emptiness'," he commented.

"If you believe this dimension is empty, feel free to build something inside it," she told him. With a wave of her hand, the image of the busy space station shattered, replaced by a pristine, gently surf-swept beach overlooking an endless sea and sky.

"Out of what?" he asked. Under Rune's studied gaze, the sky immediately looked grey, the waves frozen in place, the water itself that same glistening slimy substance, the invading higher-dimensional light that didn't quite mesh properly with his senses.

"There must be something left within you that is your own, and not just a recording of the past."

Rune's laugh was filled with bitter sarcasm, "You won't be the first to accuse me of that. But most people understand what they're actually talking about. You still don't understand a damn thing. You only tell me the truth when I don't fall for your illusions, and most of the time you just try and make up slightly more complicated lies in the hope that they'll be more convincing. The truth is, you found a way to still influence the Universe from exile but you can't quite find a way back, so you're just going to slowly overwrite the Universe with your own. But you can't even build a Universe, so you're just stealing people's ideas and making your own imitations of them, but without any of the original meaning behind them."

"I'm sorry you think of me in such a way. I have tried, but your mind can't seem to adapt to a higher truth. Algol seems to be yet another world full of people who don't possess the necessary criteria for me to even try and upgrade them."

"And so you're just planning to destroy it, I suppose, or maybe destroy me right here and now. Well, I'm not even convinced you can. I don't even know if I really exist here and neither do you. And I don't fear any power that's just a cheap imitation of another power. So, if you want a fight..."

He brandished the Elsydeon out in front of him and the blade suddenly swirled with a cyclone of energy. A clamour of voices, furious battle cries and yells of resistance, filled his mind and he saw the shapes of spirits leap from the blade towards the figure of the woman. They were the spirits of the people from the Colony, come to take their revenge, he realised. In turn, something was manifesting inside her right hand, what looked like a giant, wickedly sharp chakram made of a pulsing red light that screamed wrongness at his brain as though it was an error message plucked from the very code of the dimension he was in, concentrated destruction more scathing than a full-strength Megido from Re-Faze. Even this realm doesn't want her here, he realised, she's just using it to her own advantage. She threw her weapon and the circular blade whirled towards the spirits, slamming into one of them and disintegrating. That had been a person's soul, he realised with rising nausea. The others kept on going, launching themselves at her and dragging her down. She changed shape, rippling and bubbling into ever more confusing and impossible forms that Rune had to force himself to look at. Occasionally one of the spirits lost their grip and was immediately consumed by the Great Light's mass. However, the others kept on going. Gradually, made faster by the fact that they were learning from her own technique, they were making their own impact on the Great Light, absorbing and replacing her in exactly the same way that she had tried to do to them.

There are so many of them, so many brave Protectors of Algol, even lost so far away from home, alone in the middle of such a doomed world...

Rune looked sharply down at the source of the voice in his head. One particular soul in the Elsydeon was talking to him. He didn't really need to look at it to know which individual it was.

With another grim smile, he responded, A lot more than four, huh?

I know. We only ever had one job, we had a thousand years to prepare and we made such a mess of it. If I hadn't managed to lose an entire planet... if I'd just been there for Algol a little sooner...

Don't sweat it. Like Demi said, if we changed the past, we'd change who we were, what we left behind, how the stories were written. Too much has been changed and we never even asked for it, so let's make them change it back!

Rune... I know you hate this, but I need you and I to link our minds just one more time. There's something I need to do. You're going to hate that as well, by the way.

I'll put up with it, if it wins us the fight.

You're going to have to leave the fight up to them, I'm afraid. That's just one manifestation of the Light they're fighting. It won't win the overall battle. You have another job to do. Right now, you can't access the place you need to be, in order to get the job done. I put something in the Elsydeon. I used it before when I needed to transport Rolf and his company up onto the Noah. Back then, it wasn't a holy sword, you know, it was just an experiment with different kinds of spell storage.

Wait, you're going to teleport me again?

I warned you that you'd hate it. If it makes you feel better, it uses Grantz, not Ryuka.

What's a Grantz?

Help me link our minds and I'll show you first-hand.

Reacting to the sheer amount of magical energy that flowed into and between them, the two flames grew brighter and broader until they merged into each other to become one brilliant blaze, too large to be a human soul any longer. This was a force of nature, a law of existence, a pure concept, a defining term of the cycle of Algol's fate.

This was the eternal Lutz.

As he raised the Elsydeon aloft, its blade flared a brilliant blue light the colour of a summer sky on Palma, then Rune disappeared from the broken realm where a battle still raged. He rematerialised in the middle of another battle, although it was rather less metaphysical and involved a lot more missiles, mostly being fired by Wren at an advancing tide of security robots. He had wedged himself inside the door frame, although a few of the Whistles had found their way in through the hatch on the ceiling where the Podhead's wires left the room and met the ship's generators, so he occasionally had to shoot over his shoulder. His armour was battered and cracked in some places, he was leaning awkwardly on his right leg and had lost an optical sensor in one eye, causing him to shoot a little erratically. Upon spotting Rune, he quickly waved him inside then dragged back the Spectre that instantly appeared and tried to follow him.

Inside the room, surrounded by a circle of destroyed Whistles, Demi still sat. From what little Rune could see of her face, she looked exhausted.

"Sorry I took so long," he said.

"No matter," she sounded rather confused, even worried, and gave him a peculiar look as she glanced at him, "It is time to place the Elsydeon. Please connect it as instructed, if you still can."

"What do you mean, 'if I still can'?" asked Rune, offering her the sword in the palms of his hands, "If you're worried, you do it."

"It may reject me, and I must concentrate fully on my own task. The resistance has been surprisingly light, mind you."

"I think I might have distracted the enemy a little."

"Oh, that's what you were doing. Rune... please stop teleporting. You don't look quite... well... myself and Wren register your presence but you do not appear to have fully manifested in the physical world."

"Oh, yeah?" Rune looked down at his hands. It was difficult for him to perceive, as an observer who currently existed in several realms at once anyway, but his form looked ethereal, intangible. Apart from the Elsydeon, he wasn't really touching objects, but being repelled from them if he noticed them or walking straight through them if he didn't. He was only not sinking through the floor because he was being repelled upwards at the moment.

"Well, none of us are really supposed to be here anyway," he reminded her, shrugging. Then he carefully clipped the Elsydeon into its place within the command pod before clinging to it with both hands. It was the only object that still truly existed for him.

"Uploaded," said Demi after five seconds of ominous silence. Then everything went dark and they were surrounded by, not a planet's rings or a map of a galaxy, but a series of galaxies, all connected to each other as regions on a gigantic map, their prominent solar systems marked as dots. Some of them were a broad green, others flashed on and off, their ownership under dispute others were red and flashing to show they were infected, others still were black, to show that they were currently offline for maintenance, there were outer regions marked that were under construction, not yet connected to the grid. There were things that existed even outside this map, Rune realised. Was there even an end to the Universe? As his mind adjusted to the chaos of so much activity, to the sheer extent of what he was seeing, a magnitude above anything he had imagined the existence of, several voices began to chatter at once. Some of them tried to shout each other down before one in particular managed to yell the loudest and with the most confidence in its authority. It was like listening in on Musk Cat meetings. Demi just stared at the source of the voice, a large blue spiral nebula with dots of other colours, mostly pure white, emerald green and a burning magenta.

"Oneiros, who is calling?" asked the voice, which seemed to be male.

"I am Demi and this is Lutz. We are representing Le Roof."

"Well, this is His signature, but... why aren't you calling from Rykros? What's happening in Algol? We heard there have been a lot of security issues in your sector. Is everything going okay with the prisoners?"

"Not exactly," said Demi, "We could urgently use some help. In fact, we could have urgently used some help several thousand years ago..."


	17. Chapter 17

At the moment when the miracle happened, Myau was covering the retreat of two Musk Cats who were escorting their injured comrade from the battlefield. The warrior's wings were badly torn where they had been clawed by one of the demons guarding the portal. He could no longer fly, so the other two cats could only move slowly as they balanced him between their weight, steadying him by gently holding him in place with their teeth. The healers were psychically drained, the bottles of trimate hanging from their necks completely empty, so they had been forced to return to the ground for supplies. There were murmurs that a full retreat would soon be inevitable and that they would survive for longer if they gave up the skies, returning to Dezolis to aid the allied Dezolisian, Dezo-Palman and Esper forces on the ground. Myau was determined to hold the line until the last minute to give all of his people the chance to escape. If he was in danger of death, he could even abandon the physical realm and return to the Elsydeon, whereas each of the current generation of Musk Cats, still few in number, was precious and irreplaceable. He still wasn't actually sure where the Elsydeon was, other than that it had been taken somewhere very far away.

Just as he started to feel lonely, wishing he could fight alongside Alis and Lutz and maybe even Odin if he stopped accidentally stepping on his tail in the middle of battle all the time, Myau suddenly realised that he could sense the presence of the other spirits again. The feeling was still faint and distant but it was definitely getting stronger. They were returning to him. He let out an enthusiastic yowl and swiped with his claws at the nearest of the demons, slicing across its throat.

That was when the sky exploded into bright blue light. It began from the outskirts of Algol, washing over Rykros, where De-Vars and Re-Faze were busy clearing up the rubble and reconstructing the Strength Tower while their boss was in some kind of meeting. They had never heard of Le Roof being in a meeting before. Re-Faze was vaguely aware that this authority outside Rykros existed but there had never been any encounters with it in his own lifetime. Apparently, there was a chance of them coming to visit, so the place had to be cleaned up, maybe even a proper road between the Temple and the three Towers laid down. De-Vars complained that Rykros was turning into more of a conference centre these days than a path of trials, except every other day, when it turned into a battlefield. Re-Faze wondered why they were suddenly expecting visitors when he had only yesterday been ordered to hold the seal shut against absolutely everything that came too close, even if they were other Rykrosian, by continuously casting Megid if necessary. When the azure corona washed over their sky, sprinkling the rock bed with tiny motes of light from the strange crystalline floating land masses above, the two lesser Rykrosians knew it was only going to get busier.

They were even more confused when Sa-Lews suddenly reappeared, rebooted from an earlier version that they were absolutely sure didn't exist anywhere in Algol.

The light spread inwards to Dezolis, where the midnight choir was getting ready to take over from the evening choir. Their procession led them down a winding path, during which the leader would rekindle each of the local watch beacons, with his holy flame, a large Laconian torch lit from the Eclipse Torch itself. The beacons had been moved so that they were arranged in a spiral pattern that resembled a series of runes for holy protection and the banishment of evil, visible from the sky. They gazed up at the looming portal as they sang. While its impurity remained, they would never cease in their duty to protect Algol's very souls. It was said that when the first rays of the blue light hit the snow, turning it a fiery cerulean, High Priest Raja fell to the ground and began raving as if possessed, speaking in several voices that were not his own, in languages that had vanished from Algol millennia ago. Of course, he had been at the Sol Dew all evening so that he could cope with another night shift, so that might have had something to do with it.

The portal hanging over Dezolis evaporated when the light hit it. It hissed, seethed and roiled like steam coming off a hot surface suddenly splashed with ice water, then its chaos gradually devolved into white noise before disappearing altogether. The remnants of the monsters disappeared along with it, allowing the exhausted, battered Musk Cats to finally return to their caves, all except one, who immediately took off across the snow fields towards Reshel. Those creatures of the Great Light on Motavia simply disintegrated before the eyes of the Rogues who fought them. Digo yelled and pointed to the sky. Meanwhile, the Wren android who was holed up in the Vahal Fortress found that he was suddenly inside all the planetary control systems that had been fighting furiously against his attempts to access them. The machines that stormed the fortress simply stopped in their tracks, awaiting orders, their central command vanished. For lack of anyone else remotely qualified, they deferred to the only remaining link in the chain of command. Wren considered asking them to go and rebuild Kadary's walls but they seemed like nervous people and he was worried they might take the sudden appearance of several hundred uncharacteristically helpful military androids the wrong way. Besides, it was only polite to ask Demi for permission first.

Zelan's automated routines noted both the disappearance of the invaders and the sudden presence of something else, something that was difficult to fit into the same category as any other readings. Its data banks had information on the Elsydeon as a control key for Rykros, as well as the energy patterns of certain native Rykrosians, but nothing quite on this scale. More importantly, the Landale had been detected on the outskirts of Motavia. Its warp drive no longer functioned but apart from that, it looked remarkably intact and it contained two out of three passengers. The system ran a report that it had been ordered to prepare as soon as Wren returned to switch it back out of automatic mode.

By the time the old Musk Cat finished running up the hill to Skure, to greet his old Palman friend who stood in front of the mine entrance, still inside his rusty green Cooley-61, thrashing at the nearest rabbits with an arm he had torn off another robot, the light washed entirely over Motavia, then met in the middle at Algol's binary suns before closing in on itself and winking out of existence, its program fully implemented. All viral data was erased, all intrusions into the dimension blocked. Algol was whole again.

Myau flew to greet the Landale as soon as he saw it enter Algol's boundaries. The outer seal had suddenly been strengthened, so he was surprised to see anything come through. He suspected it had something to do with where the Elsydeon had gone. Sure enough, the tall android who emerged from the shuttle was holding the sacred blade, which he immediately handed to the cat. Myau grabbed the hilt in his mouth and was rewarded with a flood of voices in his mind.

Sorry I was away for so long, said Alis.

It's okay, meow, I was just a little worried about you all. It's a dangerous world out there. I guess you wouldn't have been any safer here, though. It's been absolute madness.

I'm glad to see it's finally over.

I don't suppose you're going to tell me what exactly you've been doing? Whose idea was it to lock us all in here?

I'll tell you, but it'll take days to explain. I met some new friends for us, by the way. They couldn't come back with us, though. If I get a chance to go and look for them, I'll make sure to warn you beforehand so you can come along with us.

Myau suddenly sniffed and opened his eyes wide, Where's Lutz?

I'm sorry. I really can't say for sure.

What do you mean? How exactly do you manage to lose Lutz? He's not a cat, so he can't go anywhere on his own. Has he been doing weird experiments again?

Something to do with a teleport accident. Don't worry, this happens to him all the time, so I'm sure he'll be fine. I think. Anyway, I think he keeps backup copies of himself.

That's not very reassuring, meow.

He asked me to find out for him where his sister went. You don't happen to know anything, do you?

I have no idea. I just saw her leave, I didn't try and follow her.

You were supposed to keep an eye on her!

I was in the middle of a battle, meow. Anyway, if her brother's in trouble, I'm sure she'll go looking for him.

She didn't last time! We found her on Rykros!

It's too busy on Rykros right now for her to find any peace and quiet there, meow.

Well, you're the one who's going to have to look for her. I really shouldn't have left Algol in the first place and I certainly can't be seen abandoning the people who need me again. Besides, you can travel more easily than we can, and it's all your fault in the first place.  
Maybe later, meow. I'm having a nap first. It's been a tiring day.

You said that right. We never get any rest, do we?

Maybe we will very soon, meow.

I doubt it. We'll just end up with different kinds of problems.

Well, we can face them easier after a nice nap, meow.

Wren watched with a certain amount of curiosity as the giant cat curled up around the sword, folded his wings over his body and fell asleep in the docking bay. As soon as he closed his eyes, Myau disappeared. Wren shrugged. It had been a long battle and he really needed to go and get some repairs before Demi found him something else to do. He wasn't sure if androids ended up in the Elsydeon and he wasn't yet ready to find out.


	18. Chapter 18

5 Years Later

Lord Kurt Panfilov watched the mining frigate on his scanners as it orbited the asteroid, its lasers slowly evaporating the surface and cutting away the valuable ore so that its tractor beam could retrieve the load and carefully lower it into the cargo hold. He had never seen such a design of mining ship before. Unusually small and light for its purpose, its specialised hold left very little room for anything else but asteroidal ore. The lasers, their tracking devices and fuel cells were also attached to two large side-arms that had the appearance of a cat's forepaws. Together with its broad industrial shade of yellow with black stripes, its curved main body for ore storage with a smaller section for the crew, it looked as though the inspirations had been terrestrial mining robots and cats, which seemed like an odd combination. Normally an ambitious pirate from a prestigious line such as the Panfilov family, out trying to make a name for himself, wouldn't bother showing so much interest in the model of industrial ship he was just going to disable and then loot, optionally after butchering the entire crew. However, he had seen a lot of new types of ships around lately, particularly near the newly discovered solar system that he heard had been inhabited all along (What kind of people lose these things and finds them again afterwards, anyway? He made a policy of taking strict inventory every day.) He suspected it was some very recent and very major political change, one that could potentially involve new opportunities for an enterprising pirate. If these people really were new – and their activities seemed to suggest they were - they might not know about the major pirates, their routes and the tactics they used, or even that there were such things as space pirates at all! The small vessel certainly didn't look adequately defended for a mining ship, which would inevitably be attacked. Maybe he would go down in history as the first pirate to destroy the vessel of a lost extraterrestrial civilisation!

Carefully lining up the sights of his missiles, he fired off a volley just as he emerged from the asteroid he had been hiding behind. Some of them were absorbed by the frigate's shields, which were impressive considering its size, but several still slammed into the ship, piercing its armour and causing one of the laser cells to burst into flames. It was supposed to have been destroyed in one hit, but no matter, he had plenty of ammunition and his own fast, manoeuvrable Rurik-class cruiser, voted the best pirate ship on a budget for five years running, was already closing in on the mining frigate. Once he came into range, which would be soon, he could start interfering with the ship's computers and slow the acceleration, then he could hail them and try to persuade them to surrender so that he didn't have to waste missiles on another volley and risk destroying the cargo.

Suddenly accelerating, the frigate left the asteroid and darted out of view. Immediately giving chase, Panfilov didn't notice the small swarm of defence drones that appeared from behind the asteroid. Quickly surrounding him, they began pelting his shields with laser fire. The prey was putting up a fight! He refocussed some of his fire towards the drones, hoping to eliminate them quickly before they became an actual risk to his ship rather than a distraction that was causing his targeting systems to have issues locking onto the frigate. He realised that he was no longer sure where the other ship actually was, and now his tracking computer was reporting a hacking attempt.

Panfilov slammed his fist down on the button to activate the communications channel, "I admire your perseverance but you're only prolonging the inevitable! Surrender now and I shall let you live to tell the tale of how you met Kurt Panfilov!"

A face appeared on the screen, a man with short grey hair and beard who looked a little younger than Panfilov but whose eyes told a different story. He shrugged and began a long reply in a language that the pirate didn't even recognise, gave him what looked like a rude gesture, then closed and blocked the communications channel. Panfilov growled and hit the button to launch the missiles again.

Then all hell broke loose directly behind him.

A warp tunnel opened up out of nowhere, a place where there couldn't possibly have even been room for a gate. The distortion from the gate hit several of the asteroids and one of the drones, reducing them to a fine powder. Somehow Panfilov managed to avoid being in the path of the gate but this became redundant only seconds later, when the looming black prow of an enormous battleship emerged from the gate. He turned to retreat but in his haste, he smacked straight into the half-mined asteroid, whereupon the ship's computer started receiving anomalous orders and decided to pause for a few seconds to recalibrate its sensors. By then, the Corsair had fully gated in and several quantum torpedoes and particle lasers were locked on to the Rurik.

"Shame, that, I like Ruriks, they're kind of pretty," sighed Yuri. He looked down at the small yellow cat curled up on his lap. Myau half-opened one eye and glared balefully at him until Yuri resumed stroking his fur. The pirate captain had learned from harsh experience that the cat's claws could easily pierce through his armour, designed for him to lead boarding missions from the front lines, to rake down his leg and draw blood.

"Is it okay for your reputation, to be doing things like that?" asked Rune. He was still nervously watching Lutz and Doran as they drank the tea they had conjured into existence out of the raw fabric of the Universe. They had even made rather dainty china teacups, a matching teapot and a Laconian tea-tray. Of the Corsair's entire crew, which was reaching the thousands, only Rune, Myau, Yuri and Kira could actually see the two ethereal beings, one a departed spirit, the other something that defied his attempts to explain it to people.

"Huh? Oh, I told you before, I'm not really that well known for pirating these days. It's kind of satisfying to stick up for the underdog once in a while, anyway. Remind people that nobody really owns the starlanes," he said. The mining frigate had returned to the same asteroid as if nothing had happened.

"Maybe you can make a career out of your talent at quantum observation," suggested Doran.

He gave her an amused look, "I'm not sure how many people I would find advertising for an Observer in the space ports!"

"Even just one every now and then would make a lot of money. I imagine people would pay well for such a service," she mused, "After all, you saved my brother a lot of trouble. He might have been wandering around another dimension for all eternity!"

"I'm not your brother," corrected Rune automatically. Your brother is here. Sitting right next to you. Why are you still unable to tell that he and I are not the same person?

"That's no way to talk to your sister who's come all this way, to all these weird places that aren't Algol and make her head hurt, just to save you from being hideously lost, and has even volunteered to help you transcend your physical form properly next time!"

"I don't *want* to transcend my physical form! It was an accident!"

"Well, you're going to have to, eventually. It's the duty of every powerful wizard. It sets a good example to others," she yawned.

"Have you ever considered that people like being in their bodies?"

"You won't be saying that in fifty years' time when it breaks down on you! It's best to practice now while you don't have to worry about your body dying before you leave it."

"I can't remember the last time I haven't been in a scenario where I'm likely to get killed," said Rune, "Anyway, you must have been taking notice of what's happening. People advertising life in higher realms aren't the most popular at the moment."

"Well, don't do it wrong, then. There's such a thing as staying exactly where you are and just shifting up to a higher state of being. Or, exploring a different place and making sure you stay exactly the same as you always are, so you never forget where you came from," she smiled as she watched the little mining ship. Having filled up its hold, it darted off at a rather astounding speed, "Does he know he's left three of his drones behind?"

"Probably not. He looked like the manic, drone-forgetting type. I'm gonna grab them while he's not looking," said Yuri.

"I wonder if you find Laconia in asteroids," she mused.

"What are you going to do once you're home, Doran?" asked Rune.

"Home? Hm, yes, I suppose I should return at some point. I'm not really supposed to leave the Elsydeon, but I think it's a different situation if the Elsydeon itself actually leaves Algol. Besides, Myau said I could leave."

"I had quite forgotten that the cat's authority transcends that of every other force in the entire Universe," commented Lutz.

"Anyway, I was originally heading towards Rykros to avoid being moved along with the sword. I thought maybe I could persuade Re-Faze to let me learn from him. I can already sort of do some of his job and he must be thinking about training apprentices, after realising that he isn't completely indestructible. Then I felt that your teleportation-induced quantum integrity loss was getting worse, I figured something like this was going to happen so I went over to help you out. I didn't know you already had a friend who was a professional quantum observer! You never tell me things like that!"

"Why would I tell you?" Rune demanded, provoking a glare from her.

"Sister... you felt Rune's teleport failures getting worse... meaning he had already teleported, probably several times from what I understood of the timescale... how exactly did you get out of the solar system on your own?" Lutz chipped in.

"Oh, there were these other Rykrosians that Le Roof was talking to, from outside Algol. One of them let me through when I asked them nicely and Le Roof wasn't looking. Are they still called Rykrosians when they aren't from Rykros?"

Myau stretched, yawned, circled Yuri's lap while treading with his paws, then sniffed the vacant chair where Doran's image was overlaid so that she was more or less sitting on top of it, or at least only a quarter of the way through it.

"The ship that is still cloaked and scanning us for some reason, has another cat on board it, meow," he told her in a private telepathic communication while rubbing his face against her nose and purring, "I haven't seen him for a while, so I'm going over to take a look. Would you like to come with me?"

"Okay, I think those two will be okay on their own from here," she said. Then, out loud, she commented to Rune, "Don't try and teleport again until I say so, okay?"

"Why, where are you go-" he began, then she was gone, through a wall. The cat also bolted off Yuri's lap and through an open door before anyone could grab him. By the time they worked out that he was in the drone bay, Myau had already popped a laerma nut, forced the airlock open and jumped out.

* * *

Upon the instruction of the second Musk Cat, the drone bay doors of the Tiny Shiny Miner also opened, both admitting Myau and allowing the temporarily abandoned drones to leave their captors and return to their mothership. The captain apologised and promised not to leave them behind again, then he hit the afterburners and made for the nearest spaceport to offload his cargo. He would have to pay for the two drones lost in battle and the other two that needed repairs and he figured his mining rate per hour would be a lot faster if he could just avoid getting into so many interesting situations, but he had at least made enough money to make it all worth the hassle.

He doubted he would ever settle down into a quiet life. With his lifespan, when he could watch the time of peace cycle back into the time of conflict, it was impossible in the long run. Despite all the changes that had been made in Algol since the border had opened and the space lanes were connected, it was still the same old Algol. If anything, what with all the goods he was paid to import and Laconia he was paid to take back with him on the return journey, the local trade stations were turning into a second Skure, one at a time, and he imagined the planet they all ended up on probably resembled a second Dezolis. He wondered how it would affect the people living there.

"'In a thousand years, what will people see?'" quoted Doran. The girl who had manifested incorporeally in his cargo hold along with the second cat (who seemed content to sit in the co-pilot's seat next to the first while the two of them telepathically discussed cat things) had demanded to know why he even cared about such things as money, why he wasn't pursuing higher ideals. Now that he had proven himself capable of achieving immortality, the next stage was to cast off his dependency on his physical form. He wasn't sure if the type of immortality he had been granted actually allowed him this possibility and besides, he wasn't the sort of person to seek transcendence. He hadn't 'achieved' anything, it had been thrust upon him. He could still enjoy the comforts of a Palman body, even though it was different from that of other people in lots of ways, and he still wanted a simple life at heart. In as much as mining asteroids in a customised spaceship could be considered normal or simple.

"I probably won't change our future all that much, what's happened," he said out loud, "Skure was always supposed to be just the first step to deep space colonisation, a trial run on a planet we already know how to get to and that we can survive on. There were plans to send an installation up to our own asteroid belt next. Heck, this blueprint already existed on the Skure database, I certainly don't have the skill to invent something like this by myself!"

"The asteroid belt with Lashiec's castle in it, you mean?" asked Doran, "I don't think he would have liked that very much."

"Well, we didn't actually know about that back then. It's probably a good thing we never made it that far."

"On the other hand, you don't know for certain that the next asteroid belt you find won't have a two thousand year old crazy Undead wizard living in it," she mused.

"From what you've told me, it sounds like there are lot of you knocking around," he replied.

"You should at least try exploring somewhere more interesting, you know, somewhere that a mortal wouldn't even be able to reach. I've seen five different wormholes I want to explore...

"How do you expect me to survive going through a damn wormhole?"

"Oh, I thought up a few plans. Most of them involve casting Deban a lot. I'm pretty sure I sensed something magically conductive behind one of them. It might be Laconia! Nobody else will have found it yet..."

"Why don't you go and find out for yourself instead of trying to get me killed, then?" he demanded. Although, he thought to himself, exploring a little further afield does sound like an interesting idea...

"I can cast Deban, meow," volunteered the first cat.

"Me too, meow, I haven't had a proper adventure in millennia," replied Myau.

"What, you too? Both of you? Is everyone against me?" he sighed, "Okay, at least let me dock up with the cargo first..."

Doran stared out into space. The Corsair had just created another gate out of the system. It would be so useful to have one of those drives, she mused, but there was currently no way to miniaturise the technology for ships smaller than battleships. Maybe if she could enlist the help of some magic-users who were more engineering-minded than herself, but it would still take decades, something for the next generation of starship travel. It would take that long for Algol to return fully to the way it used to be, although she hoped she had now ensured that it would happen. Until that time, she knew she could not bear to return. She might as well explore as far and wide as she could, to finally see something of the world, before the time came. Maybe, with some luck, some memetic seeds of her world could be sown behind her, without disrupting what was already in place. Or maybe they would find some empty space of their own to build upon.

Farewell, brother, she mentally projected across the infinitude of space, farewell, my beautiful home.


	19. Chapter 19

15 years later:

Digo stared up at the elaborately crafted handle and softly blue glowing Laconia blade of the sword being offered him, and the tall, youthful-looking man in flowing white robes, with long cyan hair and a look of arrogant humour on his face. The appearance wasn't quite what he expected from a legendary wizard who had saved the entire solar system twice but Digo was acutely aware that he wasn't really playing his part as a newly chosen Destined Hero either. Mostly, he just looked confused. He had no idea why he had been selected for the honour. He was no hero, he was just a slightly more skilled than average bounty hunter, monster exterminator and space port worker when they were really strapped for cash, which was most of the time these days. He wasn't Brave or Just or Noble, although he guessed he wasn't as bad as some of the assholes who thought that joining an independent band of Hunters gave you a licence to do whatever you wanted, no matter how immoral.

He had been helping the android unload some supply crates when Enma had jumped out from behind said crates, grabbed him and bundled him onto the next flight to Dezolis. He had initially assumed the boss had gone completely over the edge and was selling him to pay for the delivery bill – it was so hard to find commissions lately – so he was pleasantly surprised to find that the Motavian had just been ordered to make sure he wasn't late for his important audience with the Lutz of Esper Mansion. His companion's comprehension of the Esper language was even worse than his Palman, so it was important to make sure you phrased orders correctly and made sure he actually understood what you were saying.

"Aren't you only supposed to do this every thousand years?" he asked the man who claimed to be Lutz.

"The fact that you know anything at all about our cycle of destiny makes you more than qualified," replied the Esper, "But no, the situation has changed somewhat. For a start, I can no longer pass on Lutz's consciousness on to the next generation. That mechanism has been damaged one too many times to be usable again. This means I need to train people in the normal way, both my own apprentices and future Protectors. The previous protector has told me quite bluntly that he would not want to put his life at so much risk any longer, not at his age, with so much of the Guild relying on him as a leader and so many people important to him in his life."

"And you're saying that I don't have a life or any friends, and that the boss has no intention of ever promoting me," Digo's grin was intended to convey grim humour rather than actual offence.

"Far from it," said Lutz, "Only that I'm giving you first choice, because I believe that Algol means more to you than anything or anyone else."

"Well, um, Algol pretty much covers everything in my life, but I don't think that's what you mean, is it? It's just, I didn't think there were any threats to Algol that would require a Protector. That kind of thing is supposed to happen every thousand years. Unless something else is invading. Is that what's going on?"

"Not at the moment, but it may do. A Lutz has to always remain on standby to watch over Algol, so why not a Protector? I believe it would be an acceptable change to tradition," he said, frowning as though he had genuinely worried over the decision a lot, "And as a responsible space-faring nation, I believe it would be prudent to watch our borders a little more, as well as show our willingness to aid others in crises similar to our own. To be honest, I've already received a distress call from a region away I want someone to help me go and investigate. Something to do with random wormhole entrances appearing all over the place, and giant space Krakens coming out of them."

"You want to send me on missions outside Algol?"

"Some of the details of the crisis indicated the involvement of existential decay caused by Terran-level technology. The Great Light was only stopped from being able to invade Algol, and had Her last project erased. There's nothing stopping Her from setting up again, although it should have taken longer than this, and I had hoped the Rykrosian Council would have gotten round to holding their own prisoners more securely. It might not be Her, though. There might be other outlaw Rykrosians we haven't been told about, for all we know, or Terran remnants who have somehow managed to operate the technology without assistance. Or the nations might genuinely have developed that technology on their own. Whatever the case, we need to go and find out, in case it becomes a threat to Algol."

"You want me to go and find out, you mean."

"Yourself and I, and a few others. If you agree, I'm going to extend the offer to the rest of the Rogues. If not... I might ask the other Rogues anyway. This is supposed to be confidential, but I think it's vitally important that you know... I was going to ask Azda next."

"You wouldn't! That's... that's like asking Zio!"

"Oh, c'mon, he's not THAT bad! He just has unpopular spiritual beliefs."

"So now I have to agree to your demands, or the whole of Algol will be doomed to darkness?"

"You're the one who chose to interpret it in that way."

"That's... that's just plain dirty!"

"No, it's proof that you actually care about the future of Algol. Which is why I think you're the best person for the job."

"We're not going to make any money unless we expand off-planet, are we?"

"With the current economy, probably not. I'm an ethereal and pure-hearted Legendary Wizard who doesn't understand worldly concerns, though, so I wouldn't know. By the way, I need you to sign a contract. I don't want you bowing out on me like Chaz did."

Digo gave Rune a black look as he summoned a small portal to his office and telekinetically lifted a pen and pad of paper through it. That went more smoothly than I imagined, thought the Great Wizard, I was afraid I'd have to actually make Demi the next Lutz, Wren the next Protector and then leave them to it for a few more thousand years. It would be more stable and efficient but somehow it lacked that touch of humanity, the bright spark of passion that came with mortality, that Algol needed now more than ever. Those two were needed behind the scenes, making sure Algol ran smoothly, not having to gallivant around with a sword every time something went wrong. Besides, everyone was still a little afraid that automating Algol's defence systems entirely would lead to another Motherbrain incident. The Hunter spent a long time reading the contract, then finally winced in pain and signed on the dotted line. Algol's destiny was once again secure.


End file.
